The stars (1962)

TOM MIX Cowboy to an age Mix comes perilously close to riding sidesaddle. There must be a cowboy, and cowboy to the era of wonderful nonsense was Tom Mix. His presence was enough to make the disciple of pure Western form shudder. He habitually appeared in public dressed all in white, and his home rivaled Valentino's Falcon's Lair and Doug and Mary's Pickfair in ostentation. Its embellishments could have occurred only to a cowboy who, after a long, hard winter hits town and sweeps the table in a poker game grander than the imagination can bear. Atop his house, lights flung a challenge to the heavens, spelling out his name in letters taller than a man. Inside there was a fountain that sprayed water alternately blue, pink, green, red. When Samuel Goldwyn gave Vilma Banky and Rod LaRocque the wedding to end all weddings, Mix drove to it in a coach-and-four — probably something of an inconvenience for a man whose auto contained a complete bar. He publicly showered his wife and his daughter, Thomasina, with jeweled gifts to rival those of a potentate, and he still had enough money to retire ! completely when sound came. With all of this, he was, technically speaking, the most proficient horseman in movie history. Born in Mix Run, '| Pennsylvania, he had gone west at an early age, was twice a real-life sheriff and was a Texas Ranger for three years. In addition, he had been a soldier of fortune in the Boer War and had served in the United States Army both in the Spanish-American War and in the Boxer Rebellion. He made his first movie in Oklahoma in 1910, when the Selig Company, out of Chicago on location, hired him as an extra. He was a minor Western star before and during the time William S. Hart was casting the screen stereotype of the . Man of the West. It was not until Hart fell out of step with his time that Mix became the ranking screen cowboy. His version of the West was much more romanticized than Hart's. Realism bored him, and the idea of being anything as subtle as a good bad man was quite beyond him. The West was, for him, merely an abstraction, a convenient, stylized backdrop against which to act out his simple dramas of heroism. He was, on the screen, a puritan of the plains, tempted neither by bad women nor good whiskey. Nevertheless, the real Westerners who acted as extras and stunt men in Hollywood productions preferred riding with him to riding with Hart, who was less adept than Mix when atop a horse. An able stunt man, Mix never used doubles and was perfectly capable of galloping his horse, Tony, through a cattle stampede, throwing the animal next to his imperiled heroine, always a rather bland little creature, at precisely the right moment, then sheltering her in the lee of the horse while the herd thundered by. He had that kind of empty bravery — the bravery of the soldier of fortune, the man for whom risk is an end in itself. He lacked Hart's feeling for — and of — the Old West. Like most of his audience, Mix felt no regret at its passing. He felt no need for a sense of place, no need for roots. The thrill of the moment was enough for him — that and his name hi ! lights ten feet tall, reassuring him as to his fame but not, alas, guaranteeing him a distinguished immortality. 74 The house that Tom built, fit for a cattle baron, but not for a cowboy.