The Full Burn by Kevin Conley

Author:Kevin Conley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608196487
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

One Wide, One Tight, Good Luck

Growing old isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s hell on stuntmen. The hip replacements start to add up. The eight or ten concussions don’t help. And, for a guy who’s used to looking at a long wooden staircase as a chance for a pretty good paycheck, it’s hard to stand on the top step and wonder, Hey, can I even make it down this thing? Stuntmen do not, as a rule, look forward to the golden years of retirement. “That’s why so many people have shot themselves, I think,” Ronnie Rondell Jr. told me. “They just don’t want to deal with shitting their pants.”

We were standing on a deck at the top of a wooden staircase leading down the cliffside from Rondell’s house on the Big Niangua arm of the Lake of the Ozarks, in Camdenton, Missouri. He used to come out here in the fifties when he was a kid, a California boy riding bareback over the Ozark hills, and he started returning in the nineties, after he’d established himself as one of Hollywood’s top stuntmen and second-unit directors. He’d spend all summer at his place on the lake, go back to L.A. at Thanksgiving to have dinner with his dad, work through the winter, and then head straight back in spring—semi-retirement, he called it. “And it was probably 2000 that I said goodbye.” He told everybody in Stunts Unlimited, the stunt group he and Hal Needham and Glenn Wilder had founded thirty years before, “This is my last meeting. I’m sixty and I’m bailing out. I’m leaving town. I’m gone. The house is sold. I’m outta here, boys. You’re on your own. You gotta get it together.”

Rondell was five foot ten in his heyday, but the day I met him, after forty-some years of stunt work, he was five foot six. He was a diver, a gymnast, a surfer, a desert racer, a hang glider: he was good in the air. He had a thick head of hair, Italian hair—the Rondelli family comes from Naples by way of Studio City—and a mustache that must have looked good in the seventies and still worked now, rough and vintage, almost hip. When I drove up, he was waiting for me with one leg over the grille of his ATV, in front of a garage full of cars and racing bikes that looked tuned and spit-shined and ready to go, although he dismissed the idea of getting on them himself. He kept them for his son’s visits. As we walked into his airplane hangar of an office/garage, he moved, like so many older stuntmen, out of a wide stance, with a little planning.

We looked at the framed pictures on his wall, a quick tour of three generations of Rondells in Hollywood: his dad, Ronnie, as a dashing extra and occasional star in the silent era; Ronnie Jr. himself, in midair, upside down over a cannon on Shenandoah; his sons Reid and R. A., together, before Reid was killed in a senseless accident on the set of Airwolf.

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