The Fabulous Tom Mix

Olive Stokes Mix, Eric Heath

• Editorial: Barakaldo Books
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839743801
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Biographies de sciences sociales

An excellent firsthand account of the famed cowboy movie star.Tom Mix (1880–1940) was an American motion picture actor, director, and writer whose career spanned from 1910 to 1935. During this time he appeared in 270 films and established himself as the screen's most popular cowboy star. Mix's flair for showmanship set the standard for later cowboy heroes such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. His horse Tony also became a celebrity who received his own fan mail.

1—Lights! Camera! Action!

THE WOLF WAS AS BIG AS A PONY AND AS SLEEK AS A GREYHOUND. There was snow on his head and along his bony back-line and on his tail, and he looked like a specter in the Klondike cabin lit only by a single flickering lamp. His hunger had brought him into the cabin, but his cowardice held him motionless for a moment just inside the open door as he watched the astonished prospector. The wind wailed, driving a screen of snow before it into the cabin. The wilderness night was black, and bitter cold.

The man was unarmed. A table was between him and the wolf but that was his only protection. The animal waited for the man to attack. When he did not, when he made no move, the wolf moved forward.

The man retreated, reaching behind him for a weapon, but finding none. He dared not turn around to search and thereby put his back to the wolf who favored, above all else, such a target. The man kept groping behind him as he retreated, until at last his hand felt a chair. He clutched it firmly, his eyes on the wolf. Just as the man gripped the chair, the beast made his move.

The wolf leaped in a ravenous rush, forepaws outstretched to throw the man, fangs bared to rip him. The wolf soared up, all the way up, and over the table, his slavering mouth wide for the kill. But the man had the chair. As the wolf came on, he stepped adroitly to one side like a matador eluding a raging bull. Setting himself in a firm stance, he hit the wolf with the chair, swinging it in a wide arc from right to left, stopping the wolf in mid-air.

The chair shattered, the wood splintering against the beast’s skull. The animal fell heavily to the floor of the cabin.

The man finished his swing and, without pausing, launched another, bringing what remained of the chair down upon the still fighting wolf. Finally only a chair leg remained in his hand.

He hit the wolf a third time, carefully keeping his back to the camera as he had been instructed.

“CUT!” shouted the director excitedly.

Wearing the puttees and whipcord breeches that were standard equipment in movie circles in 1910, the director dashed out from behind his protective steel screen. For this was a movie set. The cabin had no roof, the snow was shredded cotton, the wind was a huge fan. Only two small items were real: the wild wolf and the courage of Tom Mix, who had just dropped him.

“Great job! Great!” the director enthused, seizing the chair leg. “They’ve never seen anything like this. I’ll make history with this picture. A real wolf!”

“I don’t know if he’s dead,” said Tom Mix, the star of the picture.

“Of course he’s dead!” the director shouted. “He’s as dead as a doornail! We’ll start riots with this one! Killing a live wolf with bare hands!”

“I used a chair,” Tom Mix objected.

“Chair! Did you have a gun? No!”

One of the property men, thinking the wolf was dead, moved over to scrutinize the beast. At that instant the wolf recovered consciousness. It had not been killed. It sank its fangs in the leg of the property man, who pulled away and ran off scene screaming with pain.

“Out of the way!” shouted Tom to the director and crew, frozen with terror.

Tom darted forward and pushed the table over on top of the wolf. He tore a leg from one end of the table. As the wolf emerged from beneath the board, Tom hit him between the eyes, again and again, until at last the beast lay still.

It wasn’t the last time Tom Mix was to dispose of an evil adversary. When the man who was to grow in popularity until he became the world’s greatest cowboy movie star had finished with an enemy, the wretch was dead for always!

There were other harrowing scenes to be shot that day, and it was a long time till the director dismissed his cast and crew. As Tom Mix and I drove home, Tom chatting as cheerily as if he were a different sort of person and had settled a big deal over the telephone from behind an executive’s desk in a luxurious office, I wondered once again whether I had been married for nearly a year to a real human being or to some fabulous demigod, and I couldn’t help thinking back to the day in St. Louis when I had first laid eyes on Tom Mix.

Will Rogers grinned and extended one hand to me as he scratched his head with the other in his fashion so familiar to me and which was to be known all over the world in later years.

“Olive Stokes! What in the world are you doing here?”

“I’ll have you know that I’m having an exhibition of one of my pictures at the Fair,” I replied.

“You can always bet on a Stokes!” he exclaimed. He had been very close friends with my parents out in Oklahoma. We both carried Cherokee blood in our veins as a further bond between our families.

He turned and beckoned to a dark, slender and very handsome young man who was standing nearby practicing with a lasso.

“Come here, Tom,” he called.

When the young man came up, Will Rogers chuckled.

“Here’s how they grow them in Oklahoma, Tom. As pretty as the country itself. Olive Stokes, this is Tom Mix.”

Tom’s dark eyes seemed to bore through me as he shook my hand and muttered, “Howdy, ma’am.”

I suppose I may have blushed—for girls did blush in those days—but if I did, it was more because this unexpected introduction had disturbed my mood, than because I felt any immediate attraction to Will’s friend. My father, whom I adored, had died just a few weeks before, and the shock of losing him had plunged me into an abyss of grief from which I was just emerging. It had changed me from a carefree and sometimes intransigent ranch child, as wild as the country of my birth, into a sober girl reaching for maturity.

As the three of us sauntered over to a bench in front of a sign reading ZACK MULHALL’S WILD WEST SHOW, I found myself ignoring Tom and practically forgetting he was even there—although I did notice how he kept playing with the rope he was holding. Later I learned that he couldn’t sit still without doing something with his hands.

My trip to St. Louis—I had come there to receive an award for a painting of mine that was being exhibited in the Indian Territory building at the Fair—was my first real venture into the world since that awful period of sorrow.

Will was soon making me laugh again. “I’m going to take you to dinner,” he announced, “and tomorrow show you the Fair.”

“That wouldn’t be right,” broke in Tom.

As he spoke the rather embarrassing realization dawned on me that he hadn’t been given a chance to say much within the last half-hour. I discovered later that he wasn’t a heavy talker on any occasion. “I’d be pleased if you’d do me the honor of showing you around the Fair,” Tom added.

“Reckon we can trust him, Olive?” Will winked.

It was show time by then, and the two men left me to get ready for their entrances. I took my place in the audience of the Mulhall Wild West Show. Both Will and Tom gave thrilling performances, though they were only in their middle twenties then, and the great years of stardom for them were yet to come. To me they were as great as Buffalo Bill had ever been.

Already I was sorry my visit to St. Louis was only for one day. The following afternoon I would have to return to school in Nashville, Tennessee. I did not have much time to become properly acquainted with either Tom or Will.

Will took me to dinner that evening, and we had a gay time talking about our beloved north-eastern section of Oklahoma. He recalled how my father would sit with a pair of binoculars in his little office in our ranch house and keep watch on everything that was going on, and how he kept large sums of money in a tin box in his desk drawer without the slightest fear of anyone stealing it.

Promptly at nine Will returned me to the Jefferson Hotel, where Lyman T. Hay, the manager, was waiting to see me safely in for the night. My unchaperoned trip to St. Louis had been made possible only because Lyman, an old friend of my father’s, had promised to keep an eye on me.

As Will and I stood in the lobby chatting for a moment before he left, I ventured: “Do you think Mr. Mix was just joking about showing me around the Fair tomorrow?”

“Don’t think you have a bit of cause to worry about that,” Will replied, his bright eyes twinkling.

I discovered that this was true enough. When I came downstairs for breakfast the next morning, Tom was in the lobby waiting for me. It wasn’t until a good many years later that Will told me Tom had waited there for me all night. But by then I too knew of his determination to accomplish any purpose that he set out to achieve!

I must honestly admit that I was more interested in the Fair itself that day than in my slender “tall, dark and handsome” escort. Forest Park was alive with excitement and swarming crowds.

There was a refreshing international air about the buildings of French-classic design and the foreign and domestic exhibits.

In my exuberance to try to see everything—an impossible feat to accomplish in one short day—Tom was led a chase around the park that would have left a less physically endowed man puffing and irritated.

Although I thought myself a full woman, probably Tom looked upon me as a country child taking a city sabbatical.

Later in the day, when we finally paused for breath at the Cherokee exhibit, I realized that I’d been babbling all day about myself and had learned almost nothing about my escort.

I laughed. “We haven’t much time left for you to tell me about yourself.”

His face lit up with a wonderful, meaningful smile that seemed to come up from deep inside him. In the future I was to learn that everything Tom did came from deep inside him. He was a man of feelings and actions, not fancy words.

“I think you’re going to learn all about me some day,” he said.

That was all.

The man of mystery, I decided. Rather an exciting thought!

Before I knew it, the time arrived for me to leave for the station. We rushed to the show tent for a breathless farewell with Will. He apologized for not being able to go with me to the train, but some business had come up to prevent him. I didn’t know then that Tom had contrived this “business” excuse with Will.

We barely made the train on time.

“Thank you so much,” I said to Tom, raising my voice above the commotion on t...

Índice

• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1-Lights! Camera! Action!
• 2-Roaming Days
• 3-Was It Real-or a Movie?
• 4-The Range Rider
• 5-A Bare Little Place Called Hollywood
• 6-Ruth-and Tony
• 7-Mixville
• 8-The Summit
• 9-The Big Top
• 10-The Show Must Go On
• 11-Ring Down the Curtain