The first bit of personal insurrection came shortly after we were married. There was another kind of pressure on Tom then: the one brought about by being married very suddenly after a life of complete freedom on the Western ranges. It burst in him one afternoon shortly after we returned to Oklahoma following our honeymoon.
"I think I'll take the team and ride in to Bartlesville and talk to some of the boys this afternoon," he told me.
"All right," I said, "but remember, we're having guests for supper and the evening."
Tom left for Bartlesville in my beautiful new rubber-tired buggy, a vehicle which was the last word in Western luxury in those days. My most prized horses, a team of perfectly matched bay thoroughbreds, were pulling the buggy.
Suppertime arrived, but no Tom. I fidgeted uncomfortably throughout the meal. I did some even heavier fidgeting during the rest of the evening. By the time our guests finally acknowledged to themselves that they weren't going to be able to meet Tom that evening, I had felt the symptoms of highblood pressure for the first time in my young life.
At eleven o'clock I sat on the porch waiting. At midnight I was still waiting. At two o'clock I heard the familiar fast clomping of hoofs on the road, and a moment later Tom tore through the gate in the buggy. He swung it madly in an arc around the house and then headed toward the corral. His six-shooter rang out a salute in the stillness of the night.
Under the brightness of the full moon I watched from my vantage point on the porch as Tom reined up and jumped out of the buggy. The throughbreds, completely keyed up from their frantic run, weren't at rest for more than a moment. Before Tom could stop them they were plunging the empty buggy through a partly excavated cellar. The buggy was wrenched loose from the horses as they leaped out the other end, and with bits of harness flying, they tore out the front gate to be lost until noon of the following day.
Tom came slowly toward the porch. When he was a few feet away from me he sensed that it was time to stop.
"Hello, Olive," he said weakly, trying frantically to smile.
I was in no mood to be smiled at. I raised my arm and showed him that I was holding in my hand a .30-.30 Winchester.
"Find yourself a tree, Tom," I said briskly.
"Now, Olive," he remonstrated.
I raised the Winchester higher. "You'd better find that tree right now," I said.
I must have looked as menacing as I felt for Tom turned, ran, and was hidden behind a tree in the yard by the time I let go my first blast of the Winchester.
A moment later his head appeared from behind the tree. "Listen, dear," he called out.
I emptied the Winchester again.
This went on for something like an hour before I finally set aside the rifle and let him withdraw from behind his shelter.
He came up to the porch looking very contrite.
"Olive, I don't blame you for doing this," he said. "Now that the steam's out of both of us, we're better off for it. I don't know why I stayed on in Bartlesville tonight when I knew you were waiting here. I just don't know why."
I didn't know why, either, for a long time. When this episode occurred I was still far too young to understand that Tom's nature had been carved so deeply in his free days that his past would keep popping out in him repeatedly when the pressures of his new worlds tightened on him. It was something that those persons closest to him in his life grew to see clearly in him. It was something that he himself never quite understood.
In the late twenties there was a different kind of insurrection. On this occasion Tom, for the first time in his entire screen career, held up production on a picture because he momentarily lost contact with his deep basic strength, the strength that had daily prompted him to do his 'Job for the world despite any personal troubles that were bothering him.
He simply disappeared from Mixville one day right in the midst of a picture, although later in the day he did call up his faithful secretary at the main studio in Hollywood and tell her he was going out of town. That was all he said to her; then he hung up.
A search was instigated for him at once, but two days dragged by without any word from him and without the discovery of a trace of evidence as to where he might have gone. He was so famous by then that he was recognized immediately no matter where he went; hence his mysterious disappearance was all the more amazing.
At home I waited and waited for a telephone call from Tom. Though he and I had been divorced for some time by then, I knew he would call when the force of pressure became too great for him.
Finally the call came.
"I'm at Lake Arrowhead," Tom said. His voice was edged with strain. "Can-Ruth come up here?"
I swallowed hard, as I recognized that tone of anxiety from the past.
"Of course Ruth can come up there," I assured him. "You just sit tight, Tom."
Ruth was in her early teens then, but in understanding her father she was far in advance of her years. She left immediately for Lake Arrowhead. Later she told me every detail of her visit with her father.
When she got there she found him in a state of deep doldrums. He had lost several pounds almost overnight.
"What's the matter, Daddy?" Ruth asked upon entering the cabin he had rented. "You aren't sick, are you? "
Tom thumped the region of his heart. "Just sick here, Ruthie."
She sat down beside him and put her arms around him.
"Now tell me all about it, Daddy. There are a lot of people waiting for you back at Mixville- and millions of others waiting for that picture that is half finished."
Tom got up and paced around the cabin. "I really don't know what's the matter, Ruthie," he said. "All of a sudden I got fed up on everything. I didn't want to see anybody. I wanted to forget that I was Tom Mix, the famous movie star- just be all by myself and have a chance to think."
"That makes sense," Ruth told him. "Everybody in the limelight has the same feeling once in a while. Most of them don't do anything about it. I'm glad you did. Now you can go back and feel a lot better."
Under Ruth's persuasive philosophy Tom brightened up.
"Come on, Ruthie! " he exclaimed. "Let's go! "
Probably few people realize the enormous strain put upon a famous person. No doubt every single one of them would give anything in the world to go away sometimes and just be utterly alone for a while.
The decade of the twenties was the period of maturity for the silent film. It was also the period of fabulous business success in Hollywood. And it was the period of the vamp, of big Hollywood money, of Hollywood scandals.
It was, too, the big period of Tom's fame. When Tom started at Fox he had agreed to a contract calling for a fairly low basic salary plus a percentage of the profits from his pictures. At that time neither Tom nor the studio expected his films to be as enormously successful as they turned out to be.
It was soon evident that Tom was to Fox what John Gilbert was to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Gloria Swanson to Paramount. He was the foremost box-office attraction in America for years despite the fact that his pictures-always films of simple structure and generally made on a comparatively low budget-were too unsophisticated to be booked for the long runs in the big city motion picture palaces that the more spectacular films enjoyed. The roots of Tom's fame were planted in the thousands of small towns in America where the advent of a new Tom Mix picture was always heralded by youngsters as a major event in their lives.
He was always highly conscious of his tremendous influence on the youth of the world. He was their mentor of clean living, and his message to youth was: "Take care of your body, keep your mind clean, and always be truthful." It was the dictum he followed in his personal mode of living.
And the youth of the world responded to him with uninhibited enthusiasm. Fan letters streamed in daily by the thousands, and every letter was acknowledged. Tom employed two secretaries to handle his regular fan mail and a special secretary to handle requests from parents who wanted Tom to write individual messages of encouragement to their children.
A day never slipped by without Tom's receipt of hundreds of letters of appreciation from parents, praising him for supplying their children with the moral type of picture that would be helpful to molding their future lives.
"I know I've got a reputation to live up to," he once told a press agent. "I want to be a good influence on the young people who follow me. I never want to disappoint them. So I've got to live up to what they expect of me." He smiled. "For a long time that used to bother me. I thought I might be missing a lot of fun. I couldn't go places where sometimes I wanted to go, because I was sure the kids wouldn't like it. I felt sort of hedged in. But I changed my mind about that pretty fast . . . after I realized that I really wanted to lead the life the kids expected me to lead."
It was these simple action films that made Tom's name a household word. Through his help and willingness to take a chance on them, such famous stars as Barbara LaMarr, Colleen Moore, Billie Dove, Clara Bow, Laura LaPlante, and Ann Pennington, at one time or another gained prestige as the pure white heroines that graced Tom's films.
The wall that rose between Tom and me was the product of the conflict that dwelled within him: the struggle between the personality of the movie star and the man of the plains.
We decided on divorce simply because our life together couldn't be what we had so long wanted it to be-what it had started out to be. It was far too late for that. The incompatibility between us did not grow from within our house, but from the forces that beat upon it from the outside. Our separation was not one of bitterness, but one of deep sadness.
Consequently I stood on the sidelines to watch Tom's growing incandescence in the twenties-and to glory with him. Always I prayed that he would be preserved to continue to bring happiness to the world. He was the father of my child, and in the depth of his love for Ruth I found happiness. I was proud that he never became obsessed with his power and did not succumb to ego fever. His name remained spotless when the Hollywood scandals of the early twenties rocked the world.
Tom amazed an interviewer once by pulling out a muchthumbed-through book that he referred to as "The Hollywood Graveyard." It was actually a collection of short biographies of every important person who had been connected with the motion picture business.
"Out of the hundreds of names in this book," Tom told the interviewer, "there are only four who are still active in the industry. You know why? Some of them drank themselves out. Some of them were crooked. Others felt they were better than the public that paid to see them, and acted that way. Then there were others who thought they were smarter than the producers who were trying to guide their careers." Tom paused. "I guess you could go over this list of names and find just about every reason for human failure there is. I like to go over it when I get to feeling a little too big for my britches. It makes a man think."
Tom consistently ignored the Hollywood women, although there were at most points in his career a number of them running after him. His gentleness, his concern for people, his full-blown personality and virile good looks made him a natural target for the lonely women who came to Hollywood to try to enter pictures. He repeatedly squelched the attempts of these women to ensnare him. But on one occasion when an "amateur vamp" persisted in pestering him, he gave Hollywood something to laugh about for a long time.
The woman had enjoyed a very brief and minor prominence on the screen as a vampish type of actress. Tom was the "tall, dark and handsome" type of man for which she yearned. She kept calling him at Mixville to invite him to join her for cocktails at her house in the Hollywood Hills.
To her surprise, Tom accepted one of her invitations. When he arrived, she launched immediately into the siren act she had performed with some success on the screen.
Tom let her go on and then started laughing. He could never stand affected people, persons who attitudinized every waking moment. He decided to teach this particular vamp a lesson. He advanced toward her with two drapery ropes that he tore from the windows.
"What are you going to do? " she shrieked.
"I'm going to hang you up to dry," Tom said.
While the woman screamed, Tom bound her with the ropes and then made a sort of hammock out of a piece of cloth he found. He settled the enraged woman in the improvised hammock and tied it to the chandelier. Then he made an anonymous telephone call to the police after he had left the house and told them to go to the vamp's address, where they would find her in an embarrassing situation.
When the police arrived and cut her down from her perch, she concocted a story about how some burglars had tied her up. The true story came out later, however, and all Hollywood got a big laugh out of it.
Tom had many, many friends in Hollywood, just as he had everywhere else he lived during his life. His Hollywood friends included none of the riotous livers, those few stars who painted a false picture of Hollywood with their wild public shenanigans. It was these few who made people think that Hollywood was something approaching a continuous Babylonian orgy. Tom's friends were among the quiet people of Hollywood who actually composed the biggest part of the Hollywood scene.
Though the basic qualities of Tom's character never changed, there were changes in his mode of living that came as a natural result of his fame and success, changes that even affected his personality and at times turned him into a man of extremes.
His extravagance became almost a disease. There was the great mansion in Beverly Hills, for instance, to which he had come from a simple stucco cottage where he had lived during the first few years he was in Hollywood. When he moved into this pretentious structure he brought with him hundreds of trophies of contest and achievement that had almost filled the stucco cottage: countless ornamental saddles and silver-encrusted bridles; an arsenal of rifles and revolvers; his enormous collection of spurs, sombreros, ribbons, medals and loving cups. These trophies, all manifestations and symbols of his past life-the life that he was constantly reaching back to look for-were egregiously out of place among the expensive pieces of imported furniture and the carefully conceived decorations of the new home.
The mansion was set on a knoll in the center of a six-acre, walled-in estate crowded with elaborate formal gardens that required the constant attention of a corps of gardeners. There was a seven-car garage that housed at various times from $75,000 to $100,000 worth of automobiles.
There was a special stable for Tony, almost a house in itself.
Tom's initials were everywhere. The T-M brand appeared on the huge electrically controlled front gate, on the doors of the house, over every fireplace, on almost every piece of equipment he owned.
This residence was a manifestation of his extravagance, the ultimate symbol of success achieved; and yet he was not completely happy amid all of the luxury. Once he commented to an interviewer that the place made him tremendously lonely, even among a score of servants and a continuous parade of visitors.
Maybe it was a way of life that he had entered into because of some spiritual loneliness . . . a seeking to find a substitute for something missing . . . a deep inner need that was not being fulfilled. When he disposed of the house in later years he did so without regret.
He was extravagant in his business investments too. He put many of his old friends into business, expecting no return and usually not getting any. He purchased almost a million dollars in stocks and securities that became worthless when the stock market plummeted in 1929. His real estate investments ran into the hundreds of thousands; most of the properties had been bought at inflated prices and later were worth only a fraction of what he paid for them. He financed a wildcat oil project and lost over a half million in the transaction.
His extravagance extended to his clothing, which had been more or less an obsession with him from youth and which he now was able to indulge to his heart's content: flamboyant, colorful outfits, business suits trimmed with leather; sports jackets that were so loud they screamed to high heaven. He had always enjoyed bright, happy colors and said they were a tonic to him.
Then there were the brilliant cowboy hats and gaily decorated, hand-tooled boots. And diamonds! The big diamond that Tom purchased for me in Montana would have been utterly lost among the diamond stickpins, shirt studs, tiepins, rings, wrist watches he accumulated-even one pair of diamond-studded spurs! Maybe Tom could not compete with Diamond Jim Brady, but he came a close second.
Naturally it was the thing for movie stars to have a yacht, and so Tom had one. I've never met anyone, however, who saw him on the vessel after a few weeks following his purchase of it. Tom was not and never had been a "salt water" man. His soul was in the plains, the prairies and deserts.
His automobiles, one of which was to carry the specter of Death in the rear seat, were specially built for him. They were the biggest, sportiest and highest powered that could be acquired at that time. If a more flamboyant one was obtainable in Europe, Tom would order it. His exuberance spilled over into fast, reckless driving which more than once landed him in a hospital.
And at last in 1921 Tom bought that "dream ranch" in Arizona. As he had always wanted, it was an enormous place- thousands of acres of grazing land... hills… gullies... streams... everything! But there was no one who really loved him to share it with him. Those who were believed to be closest to him would have none of it. Where could he find anyone to trade the glamor of Beverly Hills for a life on the lonely plains? So it was only on rare occasions that he visited the ranch, and he soon turned over its entire supervision to others.
The time came when Tom thought of retiring, but the world had grown to love him too much to permit it. An avalanche of protest in the form of thousands of letters from all over the world convinced him that he had a role in life which in fairness to his youthful worshipers he could not relinquish.
He continued giving his vast public a generous quota of films every year. In 1926 the titles of his films were emblazoned around the world: The Yankee Senor, Tony Runs Wild, My Own Pal, Hardboiled, The Great K and A Robbery, The Canyon of Light, and No Man's Gold. In 1927 he made The Last Trail, Bronco Twister, The Outlaws of Red River, Circus Ace, Tumbling River, Silver Valley, and Arizona Wildcat. In 1928: The Devil's Reward, A Horseman of the Plains, Hello, Cheyenne, The Painted Post, A Son of the Golden West, and an especially big hit- Coming of the Law.
Tom's films in the twenties were simply enlargements of the basic structure that had made his early two-reelers so successful. They consisted of plenty of action, a simple plot, a very white hero, an impossibly incorrigible villain, a number of dangerous schemes to be foiled, and a helpless heroine to be rescued at the last moment. It was a formula that did not fail to delight his public for many, many years.
He checked constantly on the effect of his films on the public, and maintained a card index of notations concerning the public opinion expressed of his pictures. He wrote frequently to clergymen to verify that his pictures were not detrimental to the millions of his youthful fans. He was his own personal censor.
"This won't do," he once told a writer, who had fashioned a script that he felt was novel and refreshing. "You've got me smoking, gambling, and drinking-and it won't do."
The script writer was taken aback. "I was only trying to get away from the old formula," he explained.
"The kids wouldn't understand," Tom answered. "You see, I can't do anything the boys and girls don't expect of me.
The story of the West is of big interest to the youth of the world- and they've come to associate me with that story. I've heard that a lot of kids even imitate me. Now do you understand why this script won't do?"
The writer was a little hesitant. "Well, I still think it's a good script."
"Sure," said Tom. "It'll be swell when we cut out some things. The role I play on the screen has got to represent a man of high ideals. Just remember that when you do the script over, then we'll come out all right on it. We've got to convince the boyhood of America that drinking and gambling are bad, that physical fitness always wins out over dissipation, that a good life brings rewards and evildoing brings punishment."
In revising the script, the writer remembered those things and the picture turned out to be one of the best Tom ever made.
It was seldom that Tom deviated from his formula. He never turned to the "modernized" Western. In later years, in an effort to achieve novelty, many cowboy stars turned aviators in their films and mixed the old Western with modern thrills.
Tom refused to resort to this device. He kept to the plains and the mountains; he used stagecoaches, Indians, and bad men. He held to the Old West to the end of his film career.
In 1929 he made a personal appearance tour with Tony which was an enormous success. But in 1929, when the big changeover to talking pictures began, he made only, three films: Outlawed, The Big Diamond Robbery, and The Drifter.
Like a great many other stars, he was skeptical about what talking pictures might do to him. He decided to retire from the screen and accept an offer to appear with the Sells-Floto Circus.
Olive Stokes Mix, with Eric Heath, The Fabulous Tom Mix, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.), 1957, pages 130-142.
© 1999, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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