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.
(Page 3 of 3)
By now they were filming some scenes from the 1960s portion of the book, when the principals have aged 40 years over the film’s beginning. Tony Perkins, who in the opening reel appeared much too used and scabby for the 23-year-old he portrayed, now appeared to be about two years older than Christianity: possibly the worst make-up job since Nixon’s in that first debate against Kennedy; he spoke in a voice cracking near to a yodel, and exaggerated the shakings of terminal palsy. In the darkness of the Chariot Inn’s make-shift screening room, generally a meeting place of Lions and Rotarians, McMurtry took one look and grunted like somebody had poked his ribs with a pitchfork.
He suffered the sissy mock fistfight, Blythe Danner’s pitiful attempts at a West Texas accent (it sounded as if it had been shipped in from Philadelphia by way of Pascagoula), and a 1925 scene where Gid and Molly, semi-sensually roistering in an open field, groped in passion near a fresh cow-plop obviously and recently tracked by a 1972 giant-type tri-wheeler. When a scene depicting “the Panhandle” revealed green foliage, and many running brooks, McMurtry breathed: “Is that Vietnam, or Missouri?”
McMurtry talked near to dawn in a motel room with old Texas friends, instructing how, for all their millions, movie folk seemed to possess natural talents for being unable to distinguish asses from elbows. He philosophized that, well, hell, you wrote something and then you moved on to write something else and the devil take the hindmost.
As a perfect counterpoint to the Technicolor turkey then in the making, he reported on his old cattleman daddy, who—aged, ill, long past any hopes of Big Herds—had freshly battled a mad cow to at least a moral victory though suffering a bootful of blood and a major fracture. It was a symbolic story, almost as poignant as the old yarn of the dying Indian tribe buying a Longhorn steer and then killing it the way they—and their ancestors—had once killed countless buffalo. And I thought it an affirmation of that which McMurtry writes about: life’s natural attritions, and inevitable change, and the stubborn surrenderings they force. You knew damn well that tough old Jeff McMurtry hadn’t worn bib-overalls—or given a thought one way or another to Texas machismo—in playing out one of the final, natural dramas of a hard-scrabble ranch life.
One night on location outside Bastrop, as a few dozen of us shivered in a chill wind and klieg lights, I cornered a big, cheerful, robust native-Texan rancher who supplied cattle and horses for Lovin’ Molly and also was being paid as a technical advisor. True, he had taught the principle actors how to mount horses without appearing totally foolish or getting hurt, how to toss a rope or to saddle-up and other “techniques” that were to him second nature, but how-I asked-could he permit the make-believe cowboys to miss or misinterpret so much, to commit so many dozens of small boo-boos he certainly must have recognized?
He was a good ole boy, not without a certain country ambition, and we’d poured enough booze together that I knew he owned more smarts than he’s publicly revealed. He lowered his voice and carefully checked for outsiders: “Listen,” he said, “them people payin’ me $3600 for six weeks a-work. And I got three buttons to educate. This is the best and quickest money I ever seen. Maybe, you know, them people may come back down here from New York to make another picture one day. You want me to screw up easy money by quarrelin’ with ‘em now? Whatever pleases them people, cousin, just tickles me plumb to death…”
All prevailing deceptions were not hatched by Texans. Governor Preston Smith and several state legislators “starred” in a cattle auction scene ending with the auctioneer crying out, “Sold for forty dollars to Preston Smith.” I remarked to Producer Friedman that the scene didn’t appear all that vital to moving his story line. He grinned: “Well, it never hurts to politick with the politicians. Meanwhile, when we need cooperation from the authorities—well, this scene hasn’t hurt us.”
I said, “And there’s always the cutting room floor. You can always decide during the final editing that maybe Governor Smith’s scene is expendable.”
Friedman laughed: “You’re pretty damn smart for a Texan. You sure there’s not a little New York hustler somewhere in your bloodline?”
P.S.: If Preston Smith made the movie as released, I neither saw him nor heard his name.
Beau Bridges, cast as the happy-go-lucky Johnny, noted that many real-life cowboys chewed tobacco. Concluding that perhaps Johnny would take a chaw, too, he wrote that bit into his part. “A guy passed me some of this stuff that looked like a pressed rag,” he said, “and I chewed it and nearly passed out.” By now Director Lumet loved the tobacco-chawin’ idea, and Bridges was stuck with it. He tried substitutes: licorice, black bubble gum; nothing seemed to work but the real thing. Beau spent a lot of off-camera time rinsing out his mouth, and gagging.
The cast and crew grumbled of a Spartan social life. One night a party was arranged in the home of a congenial Austin man who supplied booze, music, deposits of minor dope, and friendly girls attracted to the possibility of meeting Tony Perkins. It was the flop of Austin’s social season: only the technicians among the film folk appeared, and after nervous introductory drinks and chatter they segregated themselves to talk of Joe Namath, cream cheese, the New York Giants, and how wonderful it would be to see the spires of Manhattan.
Since Producer Friedman had made much—in press conferences and local speeches—of how at home New Yorkers were being made to feel in Texas, I asked one of the crewmen-by then drunk-what he really thought of the cowboy life and the region. “I get enough of these salt-of-the-earth types in a hurry,” he said. “Hell, they don’t even know what stick-ball is!”
Finally, it was over. At the cast party—attended, again, only by technicians and, this time, Beau Bridges from among the “stars”—there were mutters that anti-Semitism had been felt in Bastrop. How so? “Well,” said an assistant producer, “when we needed to lease farms or ranchers or equipment for certain scenes, people tried to hold us up. And one rancher said to me, ‘Listen, you New York Jews come in here and git rich makin’ fun of us and try to get out for six-bits.’ I can’t say I won’t be happy to get home.”
I saw McMurtry last summer, shortly after he’d witnessed the first rough-cut screening of Lovin’ Molly; he was in a state of mild shock.
“It’s simply dreadful,” he said. “Tony Perkins plays a swishy boy until the final reel, and then suddenly he’s older than rocks or water. The old-age make-up on everybody is simply grotesque. There’s no sense of direction: Lumet apparently shot the thing in track shoes—zip, zip, zip. People at the screening kept laughing in all the wrong places, and some walked out. Near the interminable end, I realized a woman behind me had been crying for 20 minutes. I wondered what kind of a woman would cry at such a film. When I risked a look behind me, it was my agent.”
With some 20 minutes clipped from the original cut-mercifully, most of it in the mismanaged “old age” sequences—Columbia Pictures held a recent New York screening.
I was surprised to find Larry McMurtry sitting alone near the front row. “Glad to see you,” he said. “I’ll probably need your moral support.”
What in the hell was he doing there?
“Well, I’ve been asked to write a review for The New York Times.” We laughed for the only time that day.
The longer the film ran, the lower McMurtry sank in his seat: “It’s not so bad if you only see the top half of the screen.” We suffered it all again: sowings and reapings, technical boo-boos, lush growths and rivers allegedly indigenous to Panhandle country; Blythe Danner clasping a bloody, wet, newborn calf to her generous bosoms and then—yes!—kissing it. McMurtry covered his face with his hands; his shoulders shook. I don’t know if he was giggling or crying. We felt no sense of how hard-scrabble ranch life might be on the high Texas plains; received no notions of sandstorms, summer parchings, winter freezes, wild lonesome winds, or incessant jangling country tunes.
We escaped to a bar, drinking silently and shaking our heads.
I asked McMurtry what he intended to call his review for The New York Times. He perked up and smiled for the first time in two hours. “I’m gonna call it,” he said, “‘Leavin’ Lumet.’”
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