Leavin’ McMurtry
The author of The Last Picture Show wrote another book full of ribald, authentic Texas. A New York film crew has made Leaving Cheyenne into a movie full of, well, you’ll see.
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“So, goddamn it, there was a beginning shame to farming up there. It wasn’t considered quite… manly. It broke with tradition. And if anything would make them uneasy, it would by cracking tradition. They would have—and did—cling to their cattleman’s garb.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah! See Steve, the difference between ranching and farming is . . . well, hell . . . between riding, I guess, and walking. Between being served by animals or serving them. Understand?”
The producer-writer stared into the distance. “I see what you mean,” he said, in a way perfectly indicating that he did not.
They had a fence-mending scene. Tony Perkins held a post atop the good earth while his buddy and hired man Johnny (Beau Bridges) whomped on it with a sledgehammer.
“Jesus, Steve,” I said, “the goddamn ground’s near to rock just below top soil. You couldn’t hammer fence posts in the ground!”
“How would you do it, then?”
“You’d use post-hole diggers! You’d have to dig deep, and you’d feel the shock all through your body. And when you’d finished your back would ache like you’d been kidney punched. But you’d know the fence would hold. It would turn back a stud horse trying to reach a mare in heat. Christ, even if you could hammer a fence post in the ground, the damn thing would collapse the minute you strung wire and pulled it tight.”
“So who’s gonna know,” Friedman asked. “how many movie-goers ever saw a fence made?”
Gid and Johnny—buddies, and rivals for Molly’s bed and love—had a fight on a cattle car while transporting their lowing charges to Fort Worth market. Each accused the other of having first slept with Molly and then of failing to make an honest woman of her via matrimony.
It was the sissiest, most awkward fight I’ve seen outside Elaine’s—which is where New York’s high-rent literati gather to juice, back-bite, screech and scratch out their professional frustrations or petty jealousies.
I sought out Director Lumet: “Jesus, Sid, that fight scene’s a real pussy-cat. It just won’t do.”
Lumet chuckled: “That’s my point. We’re getting away from the obligatory standard Texas machismo.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “See, back then, two guys fighting over the honor of their mutual girl friend would be as mean and unreasoning as rattlesnakes. They’d literally beat shit and blood out of each other.”
“But these guys are good friends,” Lumet said.
“Beg your pardon, Sid, but that’s why it’d be so fierce. The only way it’d be worse is if they were brothers. In which case somebody might be seriously maimed.”
“We’re trying to reject the old myths,” Lumet said.
I said, “Look, I appreciate that. I’m sick of tough, tall Texans myself. And I feel about half-foolish insisting on blood. But given the emotional circumstances, I think blood would flow.”
The director smiled and touched my arm, forgiving my standard Texas parochialism. He moved away before I could say that the most damage I ever inflicted, or had inflicted, came in fistfights with a good friend or two. Except the time when I was 15, and had a bloody knock-down with my father.
Over drinks that night I tried to persuade Friedman. “It’s funnier Sid’s way,” he said.
“Maybe so, baby. But it ain’t real.”
One finally grew weary of approaching the film folk with unsolicited advice. Also, it got more difficult to slip up on their blind sides. When they spotted that certain outraged gleam or heard the beginning echos of “Jesus, Steve” or “Jesus, Sid,” they moved with all deliberate speed to safer quarters. Lumet reached the point of fleeing the Chariot Inn bar should he discover me in it.
At great expense to my soul I said nothing when a 1945 scene presented a Rural Route mail carrier not in khakis or tattered blue jeans but in a sparkling, tailored U.S. Mail costume which even Houston’s city letter-carriers would not adopt until years later.
I held my tongue when Gid and Johnny abandoned the Fry place to briefly cowboy in “the Panhandle”—maybe five minutes worth on film—where they were constantly in the company of lush Delta growths, lakes, and rivers.
I stood silently when Molly, accepting a telegram telling her of her son’s death in World War II, expressed her grief in front of a pastel-hued building which no Texas town had that early. Nor did I complain that she supported herself by clutching a huge, modern red-and-white stop sign even though stop signs in them days, pardner, were teensie-tiny and announced themselves in blacks and yellows.
I said not a word when Mr. Fry, son Gid, and buddy Johnny sat on horses near a cattle-loading chute—outside the corral—to chat of their market worth while, apparently, the cattle accommodatingly loaded themselves.
Watching the filming and the daily rushes, one knew the final product would offer no sense of place: that geography, somehow, was being judged unworthy of attention. Throughout Lovin’ Molly people canter by horse, wagon, buggy, or pickup-truck to this ranch or that farm or another town, without any sense of direction. You don’t know if a given trip implies a journey of a hundred yards or an equal number of miles: all you know is that wherever people go-whether to Fort Worth or to the Panhandle or to an adjoining spread-the landscape is as unvarying as the moon’s. Though it all looks as if it might yield 40 bales to the acre.
I grin and am warmed by recollecting an Early-Dewline warning flashed by Amarillo’s Buck Ramsey. Ole Buck for years was the quintessential Texas cowboy; he rode for wages, fought in bars, and his neck was red. Some years ago Buck Ramsey’s horse tricked him off, stomped him, and dragged him far enough that Buck has since been assigned a wheelchair. This cut down on Buck’s riding and fighting, though not on his drinking or sense of humor. As a side effect, Buck was caused to read and mull Camus, Dickens, Twain, McMurtry and better. So when I called Buck Ramsey one night to inform that Leaving Cheyenne would soon be filmed near Austin, Buck gave the perfect literary criticism: “Shit, when will them folks learn not to film cowboy stories down yonder in that damn swamp country?”
Stars, producer, and director jangled in anticipation of Larry McMurtry’s heralded visit to the shooting location. He disappointed them by arriving in Austin after the day’s wrap. Though McMurtry had—and has—no responsibility for the flick, other than having sold its screen rights, Lumet and Friedman sought him out for dinner and to court his good will. McMurtry, who does not flower in the presence of excessive praise, squirmed and wouldn’t look anybody in the face while being told of what a grand, perfect “vehicle” he had provided.
“You know what your book’s about?” Lumet curiously asked.
Startled, McMurtry said something sounding like er-ah-whonk-oh.
Lumet leaned in, grasping McMurtry’s arm, frowning to show Deep Artistic Insight: “Larry, it’s about…well, it’s about…the glory of no reward!”
“Hmmmmmmmmm,” McMurtry perfectly responded, failing to look up from his cucumber salad.
Later, McMurtry witnessed the latest daily rushes flown down from New York processings: rough cuts and retakes of scenes put on celluloid three, four days earlier. Often he snorted or muttered to himself.
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