Yakima Canutt

Yakima Canutt is dead. In case anyone is saying, 'Would you please speak distinctly?' I will repeat: Yakima Canutt is dead.

And it's a reflection on the sad fate of the people who really make the wheels go round in the world of make-believe, in the movies particularly, that for every moviegoer who knew and honoured the hair-raising courage of Yakima Canutt, there were a hundred thousand fans who knew the handsome boys upfront whose appearance of courage and selflessness, whose very reputation as Western heroes, was made possible by Mr Canutt's dirty work.

He was, to put it simply, the most famous stunt man in the history of Hollywood and anyone familiar with the Western or swashbuckling stars must have seen Yakima Canutt a hundred times, usually in a blur of horses run wild or burning motorcars spinning over or even in long shots of superb horsemanship through the Indians' enemy lines.

The first name – what, in officially Christian countries is called a Christian name – may puzzle you and I don't wonder. Canutt was christened Enos Edward Canutt and was born in Colfax in the north-western state of Washington in November 1896. Although, like the rest of us, he had only two parents, he was said to be of Irish-Scotch-Dutch parentage. As a boy he became a ranch hand and very soon entered local rodeos and won prizes for roping and riding and he was so much better than anyone around, even in his teens, that it was a matter of only a year or two before he won the world's rodeo championship at a rodeo stages in the – aha! – the Yakima Valley, a huge, half-million acre, high plateau stretch, once of sagebrush, now of prosperous fruit growing, that lies just east of the Cascade Mountains. It was here that Canutt became known as the cowboy from Yakima and thereafter few people knew his given names.

In the early 1920s, with Western movies beginning to, shall we say, hit their stride, inevitably a call came from Hollywood, for there was already a generation of dashing young movie actors who itched to become cowboy stars but who naturally preferred not to make it by breaking their backbones. Canutt had the same ambition. I mean, he, too, wanted to be a movie star and by 1924 became one, playing the lead in romance and rustlers, 'Riding Mad', 'White Thunder', 'The Human Tornado', 'The Fighting Stallion' and other very minor epics, unknown today even to the most earnest film libraries.

The fact is Canutt didn't quite have the looks and when the talkies (remember?) came in, his voice didn't have an agreeable sound, but he was not on that account to be pitied like other silent actors, John Gilbert, for instance. The glamour boys beat a path to his door since he was the only rough rider in the business who did all his own stunts, never used a double. Hence, the urgent applications of some of the upcoming cowboy stars – Gene Autry, Roy Rogers – to hire Canutt to be their heroic selves.

Well into the late Thirties, he substituted for the stars I've mentioned, and many others, in any and every sequence that offered a risk to life and limb. He was loose-limbed and average tall and, in long shot, could be easily made to look like the dauntless star who, in fact, could sit sipping a drink in a director's chair and watch his fearless alter ego leap from one railroad car to another, break a wild horse from the pack.

In one of John Wayne's breathtaking scenes – jump from a stage coach, hop from one bareback to another of a flying team and fall under the lead horse to be dragged along the sand through the flying hooves of the rest and be tossed by the galloping steeds on to the desert floor and left for dead – when the director yelled, 'Cut!' there was always the awful moment, the very anxious moment for the onlooking star, when it was not certain whether Canutt was, in fact, dead or not.

To everybody's relief and a patter of grateful applause from the crew and the star, Canutt usually got up and strolled back to announce either that everything was jake – a long gone term for OK – or to announce that he thought he'd broken an ankle, an elbow, a thigh bone or a couple of ribs.

Before he switched to directing stunt sequences and chariot races with other stunt men he'd trained, Canutt had broken just about every bone in his body – arms, legs, ribs, pelvis, internal injuries, whatever. It must be a matter of puzzlement to the doctors and pride to the orthopaedic surgeons especially, that this week he died in his bed of natural causes in his ninetieth year. All hail Yakima Canutt, who risked his life hundreds of times that millions around the world might marvel at the manliness and audacity of Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Henry Fonda and Randolph Scott.

His career, and the star-spangled fame of the good lookers who stood in for him, you could say, in the romantic and other harmless sequences, was made possible by the essential and delightful fraudulence of the motion picture. Nobody has ever put it better, or more simply, the unique trickery of the movie method than the early Russian director, Eisenstein, who wrote that the making of a movie is in essence an act of deceit.

You show, he said, a picture of a keyhole. You then, in a fraction of a second, show a picture of a girl taking a bath. The keyhole may have been shot in Leningrad and the girl in the bath in Moscow, but the lightning blend of images convinces the audience that it's peering through the keyhole of a door, beyond which a girl is taking a bath.

You may have noticed that there is one famous name missing from that roster of seeming movie heroes – it's the name of Gary Cooper who was, himself, a splendid horseman and the best man with a revolver that his friend Ernest Hemingway had ever seen.

I remember some time, it must have been in the late 1930s, when Cooper was at his peak, Life magazine showed a set of what were then called 'stroboscopic' pictures – a running sequence of images shot a 24th of a second apart. As you know, in a sound film, 24 still pictures a second run through the projector and so give the illusion of movement. This Life sequence, as I recall, had 72 pictures of Cooper twirling a revolver in one hand, then reaching for another revolver with the other hand and firing at the bad guy with both barrels.

The whole thing took three seconds and, even in one run of a dozen pictures or so, Cooper's hands were a blur. It will redeem, I hope, the true memory of the greatest of all cowboy stars, to know that he, at least, was, most often, what he appeared to be.

We moved in to the end of Long Island this week where, alas, I found in my early sessions with the pro that Seve Ballesteros was not on hand to look like me, in long shot, pitching to the green. I looked like nobody but A. Cooke, though the pro kept saying, 'Think of Ballesteros and how his head stays still and down long after the ball has gone from the club head!'

It's always a refreshment, and a relief, to leave the big city and its preoccupations with the big world and settle down, looking out over a blue, silent bay and catch up with the preoccupations of the locals. Another three vineyards have been started on the north fork to add to the 35 already there, which is a happy thing to look on because the proliferation of vineyards and sod farms has kept at bay or shunted off to the south fork the building mania of developers who are rapidly converting the Hamptons – Southampton, East Hampton – and their bulging environs, into what one magazine calls 'Manhattan mit Sand'.

But the moment I substituted the Long Island Traveler-Watchman for the New York Times, I discovered what all of us who are not Eskimos discover all the time – that there is no place to hide. Like the Poles of Poland, the Poles of our end of the island are going through a battle, a battle of anxiety, about the same, grim prospect – a nuclear power station. We have one, very splendid, already completed at a place in the middle island called Shoreham. It has not been licensed to go yet and there is such a wordy fight going on between city and state and county authorities that it's not likely to go into operation for some time.

The Shoreham plant was built at a cost of $4.5 billion, a figure my newspaper says, not very helpfully, that exceeds the 1980 gross national product of Ethiopia by 20 per cent. Of course, it hasn't been paid for. The contemporary habit in such things being to postpone the double-entry bookkeeping by floating a massive loan, figuring a budget, building the thing and only then calling on the paper sponsors – the federal government, the New York State government, the Long Island Lighting Company (affectionately known as LILCO) and the citizens who pay its rates to cough up what had been set down in the preliminary budget.

So the bleak headline on the paper read, 'Debate Grows on Paying for Shoreham'. The main idea from the start was that it should be paid for by all the Long Island residents who pay for their electricity, which is everybody. At the moment, the fight is on between LILCO and the State Public Service Commission and a consumer protection board that says that nobody should think of paying for the plant, which means liquidating the $4.5 billion debt on the finished article, until the government licenses it to operate.

The piece goes on and on about doubling our electricity bills, spreading an increase over five years, ten years and so on. Nobody mentioned the obvious objection until the end of the week, when up spoke our governor, Mario Cuomo. He told LILCO to forget its obsession with operating Shoreham. Why?

Well, the governor was against it even while it was a-building because he believed the emergency plan, in case of an accident, to evacuate a couple of million people from the island, all going one way west to New York following the radioactive cloud to the city, was in a word, preposterous. But now, he says, the Chernobyl disaster has made it improbable that Shoreham will ever operate.

So we shall just have our electricity rates doubled for the next ten years without the joy of watching Shoreham produce any power at all. It will remain, however, as a memorial and an ever-present reminder of the folly and frailty of the great age of technology.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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