For Scott, forever my leading man
If I’d been a dainty little thing like Mary Mason, I would never have found myself in such a predicament. Mary was the kind of kid they always pulled in for deathbed scenes—sometimes she was in the bed, managing to look deathly pale and burning with fever all at once; and other times she was the devastated young daughter, crying her big old eyes out as Father or Mother murmured a last goodbye before croaking. Mary could turn on the waterworks as easily as shrugging. The second the director hollered “Action!”—instant Niagara Falls.
Me, on the other hand. I couldn’t cry on cue to save my life.
But you’d never catch Mary Mason climbing out of a hot-air balloon forty feet above the ground.
I stared down at the patchwork world far below the swaying basket of my balloon. Jeepers. I was beginning to think that, this time, I might have bitten off more than I could chew. I was probably about to plummet to my death. Mr. Corrigan, the director, would probably just rush Mary in to blubber over my corpse while the light was still good.
“Go ahead, kid!” he yelled from his nice comfy spot on the ground. “It’s now or never!”
“Never” sounds pretty good to me, I muttered, but only in my head because no matter how terrorstruck I was up there in that balloon, the thought of ruining a shot was eighty times more terrible. I took a big gulping breath of air—probably my last one ever, I figured—and grabbed hold of the anchor rope coiled on the floor of the basket. I heaved it over the side and braced myself for the lurch that would come when the anchor stretched the rope to its farthest point. I peered over the lip of the basket, but the rope was dangling directly below me and I couldn’t see if the anchor had touched ground or not. It didn’t feel like it. Too much sway.
“Now just shinny down the rope!” shouted Mr. Corrigan. Even through his megaphone I could barely hear him, that’s how high up I was. Far beneath me the scrub oaks danced on the yellow grass. A couple of crows zoomed past below, flicking their wings with effortless confidence. Show-offs.
“Just” shinny down, my aunt Fanny. Easy for him to say from his nice safe perch on the ground. But there was no getting out of it now. I had to get down from this balloon somehow. It was shinny down the rope or live in this basket for the rest of my short life.
I grabbed hold of the rope, scratchy on my sweaty palms, and said a little prayer in my head. I should have asked my grandmother who the patron saint of sliding down an anchor rope from a hot-air balloon was. Quit stalling, I told myself sternly, and flung a leg over the side of the basket. The only good thing about being so high above the ground was that nobody could see up my petticoats, but flashing my underthings to the crew was the least of my worries. My hands felt so slick they might have been coated with oil. I wrapped a leg around the swaying rope, clung hard with my hands, and yanked the other leg over the basket.
The balloon lurched again, harder than before, and I nearly lost my grip. I squeezed hard and felt the heavy rope bite into my hands.
“Attagirl!” blared Mr. Corrigan. “Now give a good look around and then slide on down.”
That good look around nearly killed me. Somehow the ground seemed twice as far away now that I was out of the basket. The nice safe basket where at least I wouldn’t die from an overabundance of palm sweat. But there was no going back to that rickety little nest. My only choice now was to scooch down the rope and get to the ground as quickly as possible.
Well, maybe not that quick, I corrected myself. Falling to my death was probably the quickest way down.
Hand under hand, I inched down the rope. I could have sworn it took me an hour at least to make my way down that blasted rope, but I found out later it was only a few minutes. By the time I felt the anchor with my feet, I’d lost most of the skin on my hands, I had a big stripe of rope burn across my cheek, and my heart had burst with terror a good seven or eight times.
“Now, Pearl,” shouted Mr. Corrigan. “You look down and notice the anchor didn’t reach the ground. Give us a good look at your face—you’re fearless and determined, remember—and then just jump the rest of the way.”
There he was again with that just. I’d just like to see him jump down from the top of a tree with a fearless expression. I had to be six or seven feet off the ground still.
“She’ll break a leg!” called the camera operator.
She’ll break her neck is more like it, I thought, and let go of the rope.
No one in my family had any thought of going into the pictures, not at first. We were ranchers—cattle and sheep, mostly, plus the ostrich enterprise. I heard about moving pictures from kids at school, but I never saw one myself until after I’d played parts in half a dozen different reels. By then my brothers were on their way to becoming stars—the Daredevil Donnelly Brothers, a Death-Defying Cowboy Trio. Which of course was a lot of piffle. Death-defying, my eyeball. They’d been racing horses across the chaparral since before any of them wore shoes—nothing death-defying about doing it on camera. Not compared, say, to leaping out the window of a burning building. But that’s jumping ahead.
We lived outside Lemon Springs, California, in the eastern part of San Diego County. Our part of the county is thick with cottonwood, sagebrush, and yucca—heaven for rattlers and the occasional tarantula. My mother taught me to sit a horse at age three because she said it was safer than running around barefoot in snake country. By the time I was nine, I could ride as well as any of my older brothers, and I never had the benefit of trousers and spurs. I just hitched up my skirt and rode astraddle in bare feet. Why, I could ride standing up on the horse’s back, holding on by my toes and the reins, if the terrain was pretty level—as long as I was well out of range of my mother’s line of sight.
My big brothers’ riding prowess is what got them noticed by the Flying Q director. They were working cowboys, and I don’t think any of them ever imagined a life in the limelight. Once or twice a year they rode in local rodeos and usually snatched up most of the prizes; that was about as much fame as any Donnelly boy ever expected to experience. And then one day, a month after my eleventh birthday, a portly man in riding boots and breeches strode up to my oldest brother, Bill, after a calf-roping exercise, shook his hand, and said, “Son, how’d you like to pull that same stunt in a moving picture?”
“Huh?” replied Bill in his typically eloquent fashion.
“Name’s Thornton Corrigan,” said the man. He had a confident mustache and a kind of fierce snap in his gaze. “I direct moving pictures for the Flying Q Film Company. I’m looking for a couple of good riders for a Western we’re shooting next week.”