This time Tom was to step out of his role of cowboy to appear with Kathlyn Williams in a jungle film. Kathlyn was the first of the "serial queens." Her "Adventures of Kathryn" films for Selig were the prologue to the later "peril" series that Pearl White appeared in during the years of World War I.
Making the jungle film was a lot of fun for all of us. It was Tom's first experience with circus animals. The menagerie, which had been rented from an animal trainer by the name of Tom Persons, consisted of an elephant called Toddles, a camel named Elmer, a lion known as Charlie, and three nameless leopards. For the most part the animals seemed to be fairly docile, but Tom Persons had to be retained all during the shooting, for there is no such thing as a tamed wild beast. Before the picture was finished we had substantial proof of that.
Toddles was a huge pachyderm with evil-looking eyes. Kathlyn Williams, who had to ride on Toddles' head in several scenes of the picture, tried to prepare the path for friendship by throwing an armful of oranges to Toddles every morning. Toddles loved oranges, but he invariably picked them up in his trunk and threw them right back at her.
He was, we discovered, a one-man elephant, and the object of his devotion was Tom. He would trumpet gaily any time Tom was near. He had a habit of winding Old Blue's tail in his trunk and following along like a sheep dog when Tom went down the beach on his horse.
Toddles also had a habit of getting into trouble. One night Tom and I were awakened by an irate warehouseman.
"That blasted elephant's shooting beans all over the place!" he exclaimed.
Toddles had broken his chain, walked calmly out of camp, and had settled down amid some barrels of navy beans on the loading platform of a nearby warehouse.
Quite a crowd had collected by the time we got there. Toddles was trumpeting and spraying the air and the onlookers with showers of beans!
When Toddles saw Tom, he stopped spraying, hung his trunk, and actually looked sheepish. Tom led him right back to camp with a firm hold on one of his big, floppy cars.
Toddles liked to dip his trunk into the camp coffee pots and do his spraying act with coffee grounds.
The elephant's worst prank happened one night when he broke his chain and made a nocturnal foray on the leopards' cages. Somehow he managed to dump the cages open with his trunk and, before the racket thoroughly awakened the camp, the leopards had streaked off into the night.
Tom, the animal trainer, and two men from the production crew set off to track the leopards. They found them four miles from camp and captured them by throwing fishermen's nets over them- a scheme devised by Tom to trap the animals. The city of Jacksonville slept peacefully through it all.
And the very next day Tom saved Kathlyn Williams' life.
A leopard had been trained to pounce on a chicken for this particular scene of the film. Perhaps the scene would have gone off as planned had not a sudden gust of wind blown Kathlyn's long, loose, blond hair. The movement diverted the leopard's attention from the chicken, and he sprang at Kathlyn instead.
She landed on the ground, her eyes wide with horror. The leopard hovered over her, pausing for just a moment, as though he were waiting to see if she was going to fight back at him.
"Lie perfectly still, Kathlyn," Tom called over quietly. He pulled his gun.
One shot and the leopard was finished. Kathlyn rose, terribly shaken, but uninjured except for a few scratches. The cameraman ground right on through it all and the scene proved to be one of the highlights of the film.
Because of the complications with the animals, it took over a month to film that two-reel jungle thriller. We didn't mind; pay day was every Saturday.
The day of huge salaries for movie people was still a few years away. Just as they were to lead the way in the establishing of the star system, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin were also to be responsible for the system of big salaries for stars. In the end Tom's weekly stipend was as high as that of any other star. He made as much as $17,500 a week when he was at the crest of his career at William Fox Studios, and drew $20,000 a week as the star of the Sells-Floto Circus in the late twenties and early thirties.
But in his early days with Selig, Tom's salary was only a tiny fraction of those fabulous amounts. Each pay day he would hand over his salary to me to add to our growing ranch fund.
"You take care of the money, Olive," he said. "I don't know how."
It was quite true that Tom had difficulties in his handling of money at various points in his life. Before his death he had made and lost several fortunes. Money was certainly never a whip over him, yet he was to find himself at times, in later years, at the mercy of it. The periods of almost wanton extravagance and poor business investments that resulted in the loss of several of Tom's fortunes rose not only from his lack of control over money but also from the emotional tenseness that he found himself in during those periods. In the complex world of fame he was to lose touch on several occasions with the simple man of the plains that he started out to be. Those were bleak, unhappy years for him.
Before we were married I don't believe Tom thought about money at all. This disregard for riches was typical of most cowboys, who were content enough with food, shelter, clothing and sufficient tobacco money to squeak through on, as long as they could live the free range life they loved.
That Tom thought more about bringing law and order to the West than he did in getting money is revealed in a story his mother wrote me in one of her letters. It had to do with a notorious outlaw combination, the Shantz brothers, who carried on their nefarious activities in eastern Oklahoma.
The brothers, two of the most vicious outlaws of the West, perpetrated almost every type of crime imaginable. They would, for example, shoot' a man simply for the pleasure it gave them to see him die whereas most bandits-even the worst ones-killed other men only in self-defense or when it was necessary to do so in making an escape. The Shantz brothers were as elusive as eels. When Tom finally caught up with them they had carried on their fiendish schemes without punishment for several years.
Tom, serving at the time as an honorary deputy sheriff, finally tracked them to a Mexican woman's sod hut deep in the prairie, and waited patiently at the mesquite corral until one of the brothers emerged at daylight to feed the horses.
"Get your hands up! " Tom called out.
Shontz dug at his holster and whipped his gun up. His shot rang out simultaneously with Tom's. Shontz died instantly and Tom's leg buckled from the bullet he took in his knee.
The noise brought the younger Shontz brother out with his gun blazing. Tom was weaving on his injured leg, but his aim was still good enough to shoot the outlaw's gun out of his hand. Tom felled him with a shot in the leg, then hobbled up to him and lifted the man onto his horse. The younger brother was still alive and destined to stand trial for the multitude of crimes he had committed.
But Tom did not escape without further injury. As he started back toward town with the outlaw strapped to the saddle, the Mexican woman came out of the hut with a doublebarreled shotgun. She blazed away at Tom and he took a heavy peppering, one so thorough that bits of shot were still being removed from his back years later in Hollywood.
Despite his riddled back, which burned like lava fire, and his crippled knee, Tom got safely back to town with the younger Shontz.
The reward money for the Shontz brothers was twenty-five hundred dollars, a large sum in those days and a fortune to Tom, whose monthly stipend ranged from twenty to sixty dollars, depending upon whether he happened to be a cowboy or a sheriff at the moment.
Twenty-five hundred dollars would have been a nice start on the ownership of the ranch he had always dreamed about. But without thought to his own interest, he turned over the entire -reward to the bereaved mother of the Shontz brothers, a fine old lady whose life had been turned into horror from worry over her outlaw sons. In view of the fact that he had killed one of her sons, Tom felt in a way beholden to her.
When, in his capacity as a law officer, it was necessary for Tom to kill a man, he was always deeply affected by it. Basically he was a gentle man, with a deep respect for human life. He was not at any time trigger-happy, as some other marshals and many outlaws were.
His passion for justice transcended his horror of killing. The Shontz brothers had killed more than a score of men and had eluded law officers and posses alle for several years before Tom killed one of them and delivered the other to justice. In this case he killed, as in every other one when he was forced to do so, only to remove a menace from society.
Perhaps if Tom had served as a Western law officer a decade or so earlier than he did-in the cattle-trail days, when the West was in the throes of its greatest violence-Tom would have ended with a bullet in his heart, just as so many of the other famous marshals of the West did. Violence begot violence and the odds against survival were just as great for the law protectors as they were for the gunmen outlaws whom they fought.
Tom's death, when it came, was in a moment of sudden violence, but not from a bullet.
After we left Florida we hopped around to various states for the filming of the nine other moving pictures Tom made for Selig in 1910. 1 was constantly packing and unpacking, it seemed, but at least we always spent from two weeks to a month in each location. We would have moved much more frequently had we been involved in ranch shows that year.
The year 1910 came to an end and so did Tom's contract. Nobody said a word about renewing it.
"Well," I said to Tom, "what's next?"
It seemed as though I asked that question more frequently than any other during the period of my marriage to him.
"We'll go down and stay with your mother for a while," Tom said. "We'll figure out something to do."
Without asking, I knew what that meant. I had a strong feeling Tom was going to propose that we take a flyer on another ranch show.
I didn't want that at all. My intuition about Wild West shows was borne out with deadly accuracy in later years. Tom's involvement with ranch shows and, in later years, with his own circus, was responsible for the major financial disasters that came to him.
At home I said, "I just can't understand why Mr. Selig let you slip away without renewing your contract."
"Guess he doesn't think I'm good enough for films," Tom said with his customary modesty.
That was ridiculous for Tom's films, even during that first year, were immensely popular and had earned their cost of production many times over.
This oversight of Selig's in not immediately renewing Tom's contact was, we discovered later, a result of the complete disorganization that visited the Chicago studio in the late months of 1910. Everything came to a dead stop while the studio heads pondered what their next move would be.
For 1910 had been a year of even more than the usual flux in the motion picture industry. Selig had joined the other major producing companies in a patent-sharing agreement and a joint renting business intended to dominate the film distribution market. In this war for the survival of the fittest, many of the smaller independent producing outfits died of economic strangulation. But some of them escaped to southern California, where process servers were notable by their absence.
The agreement among the major companies proved to be unsatisfactory to Selig. And the Edison Co. was continuing its badgering with its constant suits of patent infringement; Edison argued that any kind of machine which recorded picture on film was a violation of his patents.
Early in 1911, Selig decided to leave the combine and move to California. The sparsely populated suburbs around Los Angeles were destined to be the headquarters of the independent producing companies.
Shortly after this decision was made we received a letter from W. N. Selig, the head of the company. He wanted Tom to come to Chicago at once to sign a new contract.
Tom hesitated. "I don't know whether I want to go back again," he said. He had been talking about starting a Wild West show again.
"Remember the ranch fund," I said cautiously. "It is going to need a lot more of those movie paychecks before we'll be able to get the kind of ranch you want, Tom."
That settled it. We went to Chicago and Tom signed the contract. Then we left with a company of players to make a picture near Canyon City, Colorado.
Our production camp was in the mountains above the timber line, a beautiful location of magnificent panoramic views. The air was tonic pure.
Tom loved this invigorating country and so did I. So did the rest of the cast, which included Tom Carrigan, Myrtle Steadman, and William Duncan. The cast and the production crew, most of whom were Eastern tenderfeet, were soon infected with the Western spirit.
In the early evening, after the day's work was done, we would all gather in the cold pure air to sit around the campfire and sing and talk. It was mostly talk, for the cast and the production crew kept urging Tom to tell his tales of the Old West. And Tom, though he was never a talkative man, became loquacious when telling about his greatest love, the West, and about his own personal hero, the cowboy image.
"Lots of stories of the Old West got blown up a thousand times before they finished making their rounds of the East," Tom would say. "Everybody was crazy to hear about what the outlaw did and what the Indian fighter did. And about the trouble the wagon trains had and about all the adventures that came with the gold rushes and the Indian wars and the Pony Express. The cowboy sort of got hidden away under all that, and it's too bad, because he was the most important man of all."
In 1911, when we sat around that campfire in Colorado, the cowboy's day of glory had been over for almost twenty years. It had begun with the opening of the cattle trails after the end of the Civil War and had ended in the early nineties when various pressures brought an end to the vast cattle movements through the Western states. But during his twenty-year span of reign as king of the West, the cowboy left a unique mark on Western history that has never been paralleled.
And of all the cowboy stars who have brought the cowboy's story to the screen, Tom probably did more than any other to preserve the legend and to give it its proper scope and glory.
When Tom laughed it was no weak chuckle. It was loud enough to echo in the canyon one morning in Colorado when I stood before him, looking far from my usual self.
"Olive, I never would have known you!" Tom whooped.
I laughed too. "You're in for a real surprise," I said. "I'm going to play the part of your mother in the next scene."
The art of screen make-up was in its most rudimentary stage in those days. My face had been covered with cold cream and then heavily powdered to give it a dead white appearance. A few charcoal lines gave me wrinkles. A can of powder combed into my hair gave me the final bit of senescence needed for the scene. In those days, fortunately, audiences were inclined to overlook small defects as long as the semblance to life was at least partly retained.
So I played the role of Tom's mother in that film. Later I played the same role in several other films Tom made for Selig. Tom made a big joke of it and would often taunt me by introducing me to his friends as his mother. Tom was basically a serious-minded person, but he liked his fun too. He was a great one for playing inoffensive pranks on others, and he enjoyed having them played on him. In later years at certain points along the way he almost lost his capacity to find fun in life. Those were the black moments that came after Tom's way of life got too big to accommodate even his own personal bigness.
I remember one funny episode that occurred when Tom was at the height of his career in Hollywood. He had made a bet with a well-known actor of those times, Tom Kennedy, a man over six feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds. Tom bet Kennedy that Jack Dempsey would beat Tunney; it was just prior to that famous battle between the heavyweights. Kennedy wagered two hundred dollars, plus a ride pickaback on the sturdy Mix shoulders. As now written in the history books, Dempsey lost. Tom's payment of his bet is also written in the memory of several thousand people who witnessed that famous ride.
Kennedy arrived at the appointed spot on Sunset Boulevard with his pocket full of bricks. These were removed by Tom Mix admirers, who also presented the winner of the bet with an unexpected blow in the conventional spot when he had mounted on Mix's shoulders. The board which hit Kennedy had been arranged to fire a blank cartridge. The wrong side of the instrument was presented to the winner's anatomy, however, with the result that the cartridge, instead of being blown into space, made a neat bull's-eye on the seat of the unlucky rider's trousers. After the fire had been extinguished, Tom added a suit of clothes to the things he owed the winner.
In 1911 the agonies that sometimes accompany fame were still a hazy blur in Tom's crystal ball. We all had a great deal of fun making the Colorado picture. Tom was popular with the rest of the cast and with the production crew, as he always was with everyone he worked with. He would treat a prop boy as though he were his closest friend. His warm regard for people reached out and permeated everyone he came in contact with. Even in his great starring days he behaved toward everyone he knew and met with great respect and humility.
Some of the big stars of the screen were notorious for their tumultuous temperament and their disregard for the dignity of others, but never for a moment did Tom fit into that category. His regard for other people was one of his most lovable traits.
He was always thinking of what he could do to help others. Even when we were isolated in the mountains of Colorado, he thought of a plan to bring some cheer into some very gray lives.
The Colorado penitentiary was located in Canyon City. Tom whipped up a show among the members of the film cast and we spent an hour every Sunday at the prison entertaining the prisoners. Tom did his lasso tricks and Myrtle Steadman, who had a lovely voice, sang many songs for the hundreds of convicts. The response of the imprisoned men was almost rapturous.
This was merely a forerunner of the many benefit performances Tom gave during his long career. Even when he was a great star and pressed for time to fulfill his business commitments, he never hesitated to take time out to do a charity show. If the cause was worthy, if people needed help, he was always on hand to help.
When it came to attending clubs and banquets to act as guest speaker, however, Tom always tried to find a way to renege. In later years when our daughter Ruth became his constant companion, he would send her to fulfill these engagements in lieu of himself. Unlike her father, Ruth enjoyed these meetings and generally managed to overcome the disappointment of Tom's non-appearance.
Mr. Selig came to Colorado just as we finished the film. "I'm on my way to the coast," he informed us. "The new studio is about finished and we'll be moving all our production out there within the next year or so."
"Where is the California studio located?" Tom asked.
"In some foothills near Los Angeles," Mr. Selig replied. "It's just a bare little place, and you've probably never heard of it. It's called Hollywood."
Olive Stokes Mix, with Eric Heath, The Fabulous Tom Mix, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.), 1957, pages 81-92.
© 1999, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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