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93
A Letter from Location
Bessie Love relates her experiences in the cattle regions of Texas and Arizona.
To Myrtle Gebhart
Douglas, Arizona.
My Dear Myrtle:
Just a note to tell you I won't be back Tuesday for that long-postponed golf lesson, but I'm still on location for "Sundown" and have no idea when it will be finished. We are going to change the name to "All Day."
My dear, I'm learning more about cattle ! We have a dairy wav back in California, but that's so different. You wouldn't know it concerned the same animal. And I can tell you quite a bit about stampeding steers in and around any part of Texas you wish to name. Am just now completing my course in. northern, southern, eastern and most of western Arizona.
We were umpteen weeks in tents, sixty-five miles out in the prairies from El Paso. It was an awfully hard trip, but when you go camping you expect to put up with some hardships.
I have never in my life been so cold. And the first night we arrived before the stoves. All of us looked like bears, we were so bundled up with clothes.
The first day, while Mr. Trimble was location hunting, I got the happy idea of organizing a ball team. It started by two of us playing catch and ended by having two full team — actors, carpenters, electricians, cowboys with boots and spurs, and Charlie Murray for umpire — imagine ! I brought a ball from home and we used an ax handle for bat. Then we played "duck on the rock."
We had a radio tent, sending and receiving apparatus, when the wind didn't blow it down. And we had a
Bessie Love is a veteran trouper, but she found some new experiences while on location for "All Day."
cook tent and mess tent. One day the wind blew down most of the stove pipes in camp, including the cook's, so we had a late supper with the cook's temper, which was sufficient to warm up everything.
We had about one hundred people all the time, and more coming and going. Imagine the stampede when they beat on the old tin pans three times a day. Camp was laid out on three streets, Stewart Way — ■ Roy Stewart — Static Corners ■ — camera department — and Love Alley. Being true Hollywood people, we wanted to subdivide the ranch. It was forty miles by forty miles square. We had some cowboys whose fathers owned ranches near there. In fact, neighbors — a mere sixty miles or so away. We got up at five thirty, rode to and from .location. That was from one to eight miles — as the cow happened to be.
We had night shots, so studio lights were shipped all the way from home with two generators and all kinds of wind machines, which handed us all a big laugh in that country. It was frightfully cold the two nights we had to work all night. And I zvould be working in a little calico dress and French-heeled slippers. Such is life in pictures.
We worked with horses — about seventy-five head. They got up to the lights and stampeded right to where the two children and I were lying. The generator was going so we couldn't hear anything else. The horses raised such a dust we couldn't see them and calmly stayed there. One of our boys ran in front of us and turned them. Then we all got to Continued on page 114