The Searchers (32 page)

“To march in the zero weather would have meant death to many,” LeMay writes. “To arrive safely in the southern land would have meant slow death to many more, perhaps all … Morning Star had pledged himself never to return there alive. No surrender! Death might come to them at this place, but it would find them unbending.”

The other element that makes
Painted Ponies
surprising and unusual is the ambiguity that LeMay creates around Slide Morgan's racial identity. Morgan has high cheekbones and dark skin. White vigilantes type him for “a breed” and pursue him murderously. He is drawn to the Cheyenne, who act with honor, as opposed to whites, who kill out of greed or ego. “For all practical purposes, Slide Morgan had gone red,” LeMay writes. Yet LeMay doesn't steer this plotline to its logical conclusion. Slide inevitably discovers he is indeed white; the reason he knows the Cheyenne language is because he was taught as a small child by a family friend who believed that learning native tongues would foster understanding between red people and white. Still, Slide Morgan's journey between separate worlds and sensibilities and his own confused identity became a theme that Alan LeMay would return to again and
again. No matter how formulaic his plots sometimes became, his stories were always
about
something. Facts and myths both fascinated him: he used the former to create the latter.

Painted Ponies
was published in 1926 and serialized in four parts in
Adventure
magazine in 1927. It received decent reviews and sold well enough to get Alan another book contract. After Esther gave birth to their first child, a girl named Jody, the LeMays moved to New Orleans, where Alan worked on two novels about the Mississippi River and the delta region,
Old Father of Waters
and
Pelican Coast
. But by the late 1920s he decided that Westerns were his future. He and Esther picked up and moved to San Diego.
He broke into the high-end magazine
s in early 1929 when
Collier's
published a short story titled “Cowboys Will Be Cowboys.” He knew he had arrived as a professional writer two years later when
Collier's
announced on its cover a serialization of “
Gunsight Trail
, A New Novel by Alan LeMay.”

By now he was selling most of his short stories to
Collier's
,
Cosmopolitan
, and the
Saturday Evening Post
. The ones that weren't sophisticated enough for those venues he farmed out under a pseudonym to
Argosy
,
Adventure
, and other potboiler magazines. His rates began to rise: from eighteen cents per word in 1931 to thirty-five cents in 1936. His son Dan calculates that his father published close to sixty short stories in that six-year stretch, plus seven novels and countless serializations. His work was well received. In 1935 the
New York Herald Tribune
heralded his new novel,
The Smoky Years
, as “
a completely literate Western
… Naturally there is a slight trace of formula in
The Smoky Years
, since it is meant for readers who appear to dote on rubber stamps, but Mr. LeMay has dressed his necessary gambits with generous amounts of good sense and good writing.”

Success brought rewards. Alan hired a secretary with a British accent for his professional work and an experienced ranch hand for his growing collection of livestock, and started raising horses and playing polo. There were parties, cruises, stylish clothes, a canary-yellow Buick convertible, a Great Dane, and trips to Mexico and Waikiki.

Inevitably he cooked up a scheme for a dream house—a horse farm, actually, on a twenty-acre rectangular plot outside La Jolla, with an old adobe ranch house, a reservoir, and a peach and apple orchard. He named the two dirt roads bordering the property Boardwalk and Park Place. He bought it in 1936, named it Rancho Una Vaca—“One Cow Ranch”—invested in twenty white-face heifers and a bull, and proceeded to go bust, thanks to the Depression and his own extravagant plans.

Alan LeMay could write about Western myths, but he couldn't create his own. “
I am now thirty-eight years old
,” he wrote to his parents in June 1937. “In review, it seems to me that I have spent most of the thirty-eight years worrying.”

He was an energetic buzz saw of a man, five-foot-six, with a big head, thick chest, and wide shoulders atop truncated legs. The hand-tooled, high-heeled cowboy boots he always wore added two more inches. His blunt features—bushy eyebrows, sharp nose and chin, steel-gray hair combed back from his forehead—added to the sense of a small, powerful, and explosive package. When he drank too much, the explosions were more likely. Starting in college, where he smoked to stay awake so that he could study and write through the night, he was a two-pack-a-day man with a seemingly permanent cough. When the family doctor prescribed Parliaments, one of the early filtered cigarettes with a small wad of cotton at the end, Alan tried them once and then gave up. “
Dad said they tasted like a steam kettle
,” Dan LeMay recalled. “He immediately went back to Camels.”

Pugnacious and constantly in motion, Alan was an amateur boxer, polo player, and—an avocation he suddenly chose to acquire in his mid-fifties—race car driver. The kind of man who, when he discovered he was afraid of flying, willed himself to take aviation lessons to conquer what he called “this shameful cowardice.”

He was highly critical of his own work and scathing about other people's. He refused to read anyone else's manuscript: those naïve neophytes who foolishly sent him theirs in hope of receiving a helpful critique or encouragement got their envelopes back unopened. As he explained to Dan, why give away his valuable insights for free?

Even when Alan was writing, he couldn't stop moving, pacing the floor in his study and fashioning giant chains of paper clips. He was always working, always looking for the next great project and the big payday. Vacations were just a drain; he couldn't afford either the time or the money. Yet for all his outward purposefulness and steely determination, he was a finicky writer, endlessly overhauling entire manuscripts and stalling out from his own self-doubt. “
The deadline I believe would actually be a help
,” he once wrote to his literary agent in New York, Max Wilkinson, “for it would put a check on the infinite shuffling and reshuffling of the possibilities to which I seem prone. I have a notion that any improvement achieved by countless substitutions of components, all to the same effect, is purely accidental. It's a rut I get into; but I can make up my mind when I have to.”

By the late 1930s he and Esther were drinking heavily and fighting constantly, and later that year they separated. Alan moved back to his parents' house in Aurora, Illinois, with Jody and Dan. Within months he'd met another girl from Illinois, Arlene Hoffman, manager of a local radio station where Alan worked part-time as an engineer. After the divorce from Esther was finalized,
he and Arlene got married
in Las Vegas in July 1939. He had a new wife, two kids, and a monthly alimony bill, at a time when the magazine business was drying up along with book sales.

Alan LeMay decided to go where the money was: he moved to Hollywood.

WESTERN MOVIES HAD SUFFERED a long creative hiatus in the early days of sound, when they were largely exiled to the cheaper studios and the realm of B movies and children's Saturday matinees. But now they were in the midst of a major comeback and on the brink of a golden age. A-list directors such as Raoul Walsh and John Ford were returning to the genre and carving out a visual style of storytelling that fit the demands of the form, and actors like Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Henry Fonda, and a relative newcomer named John Wayne were thriving.

Alan had never written a screenplay, but Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount offered him a job as a story consultant. DeMille was looking for “
a more primal tint of virility
on his palette,” according to Jesse Lasky Jr., one of his regular screenwriters, and Alan's ability to turn out alphamale Westerns seemed like just what the self-styled great showman of the cinema was looking for. The job was like a velvet coffin: DeMille paid well but in return demanded sycophancy and trafficked in insult and humiliation.

DeMille liked to launch a new scriptwriting project with a marathon session aboard his yacht, the
Seaward
.
He summoned Alan just days
after the wedding to Arlene—prompting her to tell friends that they had spent their honeymoon on Cecil B. DeMille's yacht, only she didn't get to go. The movie at hand was
North West Mounted Police
, starring Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, and Paulette Goddard, a melodrama about a Texas Ranger, dispatched to Canada to hunt down an outlaw, who falls in love with a nurse who is involved with a Mountie, who in turn … etcetera. Alan's first screenplay—he shared the credit with Lasky and C. Gardner Sullivan—became a box office hit, but one that
he described to his parents as “
a hashed-over product
, every line hammered down into plastic pulp and cast into some synthetic shape.”

Still, DeMille admired Alan's work enough to hire him again for
Reap the Wild Wind
, another lusty drama, this one set off the Florida Keys, complete with shipwrecks and underwater combat with a giant squid. It starred Ray Milland, Goddard, and Wayne, a veteran B-movie actor fresh from his recent success in John Ford's
Stagecoach
. Again, the work began on DeMille's yacht; Alan described to his parents a sumptuous dinner of Hungarian goose liver, oxtail soup, birch partridge, and peach blanch mango in a rare old kirsch. “
In social moments, as at dinner
, DeMille becomes a host of the superlative, old southern gentleman type, in violent contrast to his angry tornadoing at all other times,” Alan wrote them.

After working intensely to churn out a script he was proud of, Alan was bitterly disappointed by the picture itself. The giant squid looked like “
the world's most bewildered inner tube
” despite all the money DeMille spent on special effects. The best faint praise that Alan could offer: “It is definitely not as bad as
North West Mounted
.”

Despite Alan's disdain, the credits with DeMille opened up a world of steady, lucrative work. Alan was an independent scriptwriter—he never knew where his next paycheck might come from—but a well-paid one. In the mid-1940s he spent a year on contract at Warner Brothers, where he contributed to various second-tier Westerns. He became known as an “outdoor writer,” yet one who could write meaty parts for women.

Even though he was working more steadily than most independent screenwriters, Alan LeMay still careened from prosperity to famine and back again. In 1945 he reported he had an eight-month cushion of savings. A year later he had to borrow money to pay the bills. In June 1947 he was still in trouble, yet eighteen months later he was able to produce an early television pilot with his own surplus funds.

Alan and Arlene's lifestyle
was affluent, although a serious notch below Hollywood aristocracy. They lived in a succession of comfortable houses, starting with an elaborate rental on Lookout Mountain that was formerly occupied by Errol Flynn. In 1951 they bought a house on a quiet block of Toyopa Drive in Pacific Palisades. It was a sensible two-story affair, with gnarly camphor trees slouching like twisted sentries on both sides of the front door walk. Charlton Heston lived across the street, and Walter Matthau, Mel Blanc, and Audrey Hepburn eventually moved nearby.
The great Frank Sinatra rented a house
near the beach for himself and Ava Gardner in 1950 at a time when he was struggling as
an actor and a voice. The LeMay house was designed by Paul Williams, an African-American architect who not only drew up plans for opulent mansions for celebrities but also designed reliable middle-class houses for people like the LeMays. The purchase price was $37,500.

Arlene wanted children, and the LeMays wound up adopting two newborns—Molly and Mark—in the mid-1940s. Alan made clear that this second round of parenthood wasn't his idea; nonetheless, he held up his end as a father.

By then he had figured out that the real money in Hollywood didn't lie in screenwriting, and he pressed various studios to give him a shot at producing or directing. But he was too much in demand as a writer. When studios showed an interest in his comic novel
The Useless Cowboy
, Alan tried for a producer's credit, but
Gary Cooper intervened
and took it for himself. The result,
Along Came Jones
, became one of Cooper's biggest hits. Next, Alan formed an independent production company with his friend George Templeton. Together they took a cast and crew to the Texas Panhandle and filmed two low-budget Westerns with screenplays based on Alan's novels:
The Sundowners
(1949), directed by Templeton and starring Robert Preston, Robert Sterling, and Chill Wills; and
High Lonesome
(1950), which Alan directed as well as produced. Neither made any money, and Alan's direction of
High Lonesome
was panned by reviewers as stiff and unconvincing. But he enjoyed working on location, and both films featured fabulous shots of Palo Duro Canyon, the former Comanche stronghold, now overrun by white men in cowboy outfits firing pistols with blank cartridges while the movie cameras rolled.