Have Tux Will Travel by Pete Martin

Author:Pete Martin [Martin, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

SPEAKING OF a high finish, I have a nice, shiny high finish of scar tissue on my carcass to remind me of some of the films I've made. I’ve had a number of close calls. When I remember them I get an uneasy feeling that I'm living on borrowed time. Especially when I recall the close calls I had flying a million miles or so for the USO in World War II.

Once while I was making a film with the gay and carefree title of Fancy Pants, I was thrown from a prop horse seven feet high and landed on my back on a cement floor. Lucille Ball was supposed to be giving me riding lessons, and George Marshall, the director, wanted more action and more jiggle for the close-ups. So he'd ordered the restraining straps removed from the prop steed. When it started its mechanical jouncing it went faster and faster. Then it tossed me off.

I was still conscious when they carried me out, and I was sure I had broken something important. Still, once a ham always a ham, so, as I passed the doorman, I said in a confidential tone, "Straight to the Lakeside Country Club, please. Maybe I can break seventy too."

Instead they took me to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital and put me under the X-ray machine. Aside from a sore back and a sorer head, I was all right. But my head was so sore that I wrote a letter to Henry Ginsberg, who was then head of the studio. As I cast an eye backward, Paramount had as many heads as Hydra, a monster I remember vaguely and unpleasantly from Fairmount Junior High. Henry is now teamed with Edna Ferber and George Stevens, who made Shane and A Place in the Sun, to film the Ferber story, Giant, as an independent venture. Anyhow I wrote:

Dear Henry:

I want to thank you for your kindness during my recent illness and tell you that you did not have to do it, I wasn't going to sue. . . Inasmuch as you are going to have to explain my $4,500 doctor bills at the next stockholders' meeting (assuming you are still with the company), I think I should explain that they are not out of line.

You and I know that in the old days when a man fell on his back, he got up, tightened his belt and walked back into the bar. . . . But medicine has made great strides during our generation. When I woke up in the hospital, four nurses were standing over me, a doctor was feeling my pulse, and a specialist was busy on the phone checking with the bank to see how much we would go for.

Then they started the tests which you find on Page Three of the bill. Meantime, no one would tell me how I was doing. Finally I picked up the phone, got an outside wire, called the hospital and asked how Bob Hope was doing. I'd taken a turn for the worse.

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