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Could a Broken Neck Stop Him? Not Much!
Richard Talmadge is a living example that a man can break his neck in the movies and still go on doing daredevil stunts. It's only a matter of nerve, he says. But if you lose that, you're gone!
By A. L. Wooldridge
TEN thousand persons jammed Olive Street and Pershing Square in the heart of Los Angeles one day about a year ago. On a hotel window ledge, five stories up, a young man was poised, about to leap to the street. The door to his room was locked.
"It's suicide!" a nervous little woman said. "It will kill him, sure as fate!" replied another. "He will break his neck ! Why don't the police stop him ?"
Morbid curiosity held them. If he did break his neck — well, it was his neck. If he killed himself — well, they would see the suicide.
The strange thing about it was that the young man had broken his neck several months before — and had lived. And he was now trying to find out just what effect a broken neck would have on a fellow's nerve. He had been making leaps into space for years — in fact, had been raised as a gymnast and had been a tumbler in a circus. So he wasn't afraid of aerial stunts — that is, he hadn't been, up to the time he had snapped a vertebra at the base of his skull. He wanted now to find out whether that accident would make him afraid. Would his self-assurance desert him ?
You see, Richard Talmadge was taking stock. He was studying himself. His heart bravely told him, "You're all right again. You're as good as ever." But from away back in his mind there came the warning, "Be careful, now ! That's how you got hurt."
One of his most notable feats was a seventy-twofoot plunge down the side of a mountain. He landed uninjured.
As soon as his broken neck had healed, Dick went out and jumped from a five-story building, just to make sure he hadn't lost his nerve.
Young Talmadge had once plunged seventy-two feet down a mountainside into a pile of sliding sand and had escaped uninjured. He had driven an automobile over a cliff, jumped from the car in mid-air, and landed without a scratch. Then, in making an almost inconsequential leap from the roof of a small building into a motor car, his head had struck the back of a seat and his neck had snapped. Paralysis had threatened and the surgeons had given him up.
I sat in Dick's office at Universal one day not long ago and heard him describe how he had felt that day as he had poised himself on the window ledge of that hotel. He very frankly admitted that the intended leap of forty-five or fifty feet had seemed more important to him than almost anything he had ever done in pictures.
"It wasn't that the distance was so great," he said, "but I wanted to know myself. I had done more dangerous things, but the point was, what would my mind say to me now? Would it stop me? Let me tell you that one of the happiest moments of my life was when I jumped from that window and landed safely on the mattress in the '