Macleans
By Robert Collins
November 1, 1954
[Archive Article]
Some months he’s a Hollywood
actor earning $350 a week and hobnobbing with the idols of the bobbysox brigade
ON THE morning of last February 5 a deadpan Cree Indian
named Jonas Applegarth arrived at Calgary airport in rumpled brown slacks, a
zippered wind breaker, a green cowboy shirt, a battered felt hat and worn
shoes. He checked a small dilapidated suitcase and a bedroll at the baggage
scales, answered a newspaper reporter’s questions in toneless monosyllables and
eyed his Los Angeles-bound plane with the suspicious air of a man who had never
been near an aircraft before - which, indeed, he hadn’t.
On the night of May 7 a debonair Cree na ed Jonas Wildhorse
alighted from a Los Angeles flight into Calgary, resplendent in double-breasted
grey gabardine suit with a razor-sharp crease, black silk shirt, hand-woven
tie, jaunty tropical hat and thick-soled brogues. He waved airily from the
gangway, claimed a natty traveling bag, kissed his astonished wife in front of
the other passengers and when a photographer called “How about a picture, Jonas?”
he graciously tilted his right profile and flashed a toothpaste-ad smile.
He looked and acted like a Hollywood
actor— which, indeed, he was. It was the same Jonas of thirteen weeks before
but now Jonas was in the movies.
The transformation of Jonas Applegarth, of Hobbema, Alta.,
was a remarkable feat even for Hollywood.
In thirteen weeks movieland remodeled him from a farmer with no money, no
education and no future info a Sunset Boulevard habitué with a stage name, an
agent and a salary of $350 a week. Most Hollywood
hopefuls struggle years for what Applegarth attained in three months.
Until last February he had never ventured outside Alberta, he lived in a
farmhouse or tent, generally traveled by horse and buggy and attended an
average of two movies a year.
Since then he has traveled fen thousand miles by plane and
by Warner Brothers Cadillac, seen California, Arizona, Mexico,
Florida and the West Indies, lived in Hollywood’s finest hotels
and acted in his third movie. Playing an Indian each time, Applegarth has battled
his way through two Alan Ladd movies Saskatchewan
and Drumbeat — and Battle Cry, in which he joined Van Heflin’s U. S. Marines in
fighting the Japs.
Six studios have interviewed him with future roles in mind.
He’s a member of the Hollywood Screen Actors’ Guild. Bobbysoxers have even
asked for his autograph.
In spite of this, Applegarth, a 33-year-old six-footer with
strong white teeth, sharp bronzed profile with a-pound wedge-shaped frame, is
still a Hobbema Indian and proud of it. Between movies he hurries home to his
Cree wife and neighbors. He still uses the name Applegarth off screen and will
probably retain it on screen too. When he returned home in May his tribe vetoed
the stage name, Wildhorse, bestowed upon him by the Warner Brothers publicity
department. The Hobbema Crees feel a man should not change his given name even
for Hollywood.
But he’ll never completely return to the old life, which wasn’t very
interesting. In fact, the contrast between his past and present career is a
more intriguing tale than most of his movie plots so far.
Applegarth was born on the Cree reservation, fifty miles
south of Edmonton.
He was orphaned at seven and adopted by a farmer neighbor, Sam Buffalo.
Applegarth didn’t care for school and almost immediately went to work in the
fields. He speaks fluent self-taught English, apart from occasional lapses into
“dese” and “dose.” At sixteen he turned rodeo rider and roamed the Alberta fair circuit
each summer for a decade spurring mean broncos and learning to take falls.
He caught the eye of many a girl but plump darkhaired Helen
Crane, the Hobbema chief’s daughter, caught his. Ten or eleven years ago Applegarth
is not sure which—they were married. Chief Jim Crane helped his son-in-law set
up housekeeping on an oats-and-barley farm. Applegarth settled down to raising
a family and living the humdrum existence of the other sixteen hundred Indians
on the reserve.
Aside from rodeo season he never traveled beyond the bleak
little settlement, of Hobbema with its four grain elevators, write-painted
grocery stores, community hall, coffee shop and billiard hall strung out along
the Edmonton-Calgary big! way. He cared little for the other towns, where white
men glanced disdainfully at him and his people. On rare occasions his wife coaxed
him to a movie at nearby Ponoka but Applegarth preferred a good poker game and
couldn’t tell one movie star from another.
Although as an Indian he could not legally buy a drink, he
enjoyed a swig of homemade wine now and then. He kept out of trouble with the
RCMP, attended mass on the reserve fairly regularly and was a devoted father to
seven-year-old Rachel and two-year-old Bernice.
Applegarth’s first experience of movie life came in the
summer of 1953 when Warner Brothers filmed Saskatchewan
in Banff. The
studio sent a man around Alberta
to draft Indian extras to ride horseback, shoot Mounties, be shot themselves
and mutter fiercely in crowd scenes. It seemed like pleasant work at $9.80 a
day. Since Applegarth had nothing else to do he hired on with a hundred or so
others from Hobbema. For six weeks he obligingly bit the dust or fell in the
river as the script prescribed. The work was easy for an ex-rodeo rider and, at
ten dollars extra per fall, Applegarth fell with enthusiasm. Director Raoul Walsh
was impressed.
“When Mr. Walsh wanted men I always pick Jonas first ’cause
I knew he wasn’t afraid to take falls,” says John Johnson of Hobbema, who, as
vice-president of the Alberta Indian Association, took charge of the Banff
Indians. “Pretty soon Mr. Walsh always asking me, ‘Where’s the big fella?
Where’s Jonas?”
When Saskatchewan
was filmed Applegarth and his friends took a bus home, gloated over their
adventure a while, then forgot it. But Hollywood
hadn’t forgotten Applegarth.
During the winter Walsh began casting for the war movie,
Battle Cry. Lead roles went to Van Heflin, James Whitmore, Aldo Ray and Nancy
Olson. The minor role of Shining Lighttower, a Navajo Indian in the U. S.
Marines, called for “a full-blooded young Indian, tall and husky, with a nose
like the Indians on the old buffalo nickel.” Walsh remembered Applegarth, who
fitted the description to a nose.
One stormy day in early February a neighbor delivered a
telegram by sleigh to the Applegarth farm. Could Jonas come to Hollywood? Jonas, remembering the $9.80 a
day, thought he could. He took a sleigh to Hobbema, a bus to Calgary and arrived there shortly after 11
p.m. Arthur Hersh, the Calgary Warner Brothers representative, had reserved a
room for him in a better-class downtown hotel. But when Applegarth appeared the
night clerk said he hadn’t been able to hold the reservation. A second hotel
also turned them down. Finally Hersh found a tolerant night clerk across the
railway tracks.
It was not an auspicious beginning and, by morning,
Applegarth was afraid he had made a bad move. At the airport Calgary Herald
reporter Myron Laka asked, “You pretty excited about going to Hollywood and acting with all the stars?”
“Don’t think I’ll like it,” said Applegarth.
But that evening as he stepped from his plane at the Los Angeles airport a
uniformed chauffeur moved forward and touched his hat.
“Mr. Applegarth?” he said. “I’m from Warner’s. Your car is
over here.”
A company limousine whisked him to the Hollywood
Knickerbocker Hotel and a ten-dollar-a-day room. There was no prejudice there.
Applegarth began to cheer up. He dropped his luggage and went out to “look at
dat town.” He was dazzled by the blaze of neon and the colored searchlights that
sweep the Hollywood sky.
He was dazed the next day when the studio fitted him into a
Marine uniform, gave him a crew cut and tossed him a thick script. Director
Walsh was so sure that Applegarth would be right for the role of Shining
Lighttower that he offered him the part without a screen test. Five days later
he caught a plane for Vieques Island, a scrap of land off Puerto Rico in the West Indies, where battle scenes were to be filmed.
Here several earnest young men and women proceeded to turn a
Canadian Indian into a Hollywood redskin.
After thirty-three years trying to learn proper English, Applegarth was
encouraged to use a broken accent. Each morning at eight the make-up department
darkened his dark skin and fastened on a wig. As Shining Lighttower, the
Indian, he wore long braids. As Lighttower, the rookie Marine, he wore an army
hairdo. In the movie script, after seeing himself in a fresh army haircut,
Lighttower yelps, “I been scalped.”
Each day Applegarth checked the list of scenes to be filmed
and, if required, went before the cameras. “I was kind of bashful at first,” he
admits, “with three cameras rolling and all dose guys watching me.” But
outwardly, as usual, he showed no emotion.
“He was never flustered,” writes Carleton Young, a U.
S.-army lieutenant-colonel, former Broadway actor and fellow player in Battle
Cry, who befriended Applegarth. “What he didn’t understand he asked about but
he didn’t let any of it rattle him.”
Actors Were His Pals
Applegarth’s rumbling bass voice was an asset. So was the
new confidence and dignity that Hollywood
imparted. For the first time in his life, he says, white men were treating him
as a human being and an equal, rather than as an Indian. All his fellow actors
were kind and considerate.
“That Van Heflin, he treated me like his brother,” says
Applegarth. Actor Aldo Ray sometimes coached him on his lines. A couple of
friendly Texans, brash breezy Justice McQueen and six-foot-five Fess Parker,
both fellow Marines in Battle Cry, seeing that Jonas was shy and lonesome, took
him in hand.
Parker, a veteran of radio and movie parts, helped Jonas
rehearse. McQueen cheered him up when he was homesick, a sometimes hazardous
prop; osition. One day, when McQueen had snapped him out of the blues, the mus|
cular Jonas draped an arm around the ; 7’exan’s shoulders, squeezed and said,
“Mac, I like you. You’re a real friend.”
McQueen wheezed like a rusty accordion. Ho told Parker
later, “He damn near broke my ribs.”
Although Applegarth was gaining i confidence he seemed to be
perspiring unnaturally in the West Indies
heat. 11 turned out he was still wearing woolen underwear. In Hobbema, he
explained, he always wore winter underwear in February. After sweating it out
for a few days in a hundred-degree heat he finally broke with tradition.
The cast and crew, discovering a sense of humor under his
blank expression, included him in their jokes. Ancient Indian gags came out of
mothballs but they were never malicious. The actors ribbed Applegarth, the
Indian, the same way they heckled McQueen, the Texan. Once he realized this,
Applegarth was a willing straight man.
One day the cast stood by while the cameras photographed
Marine amphibious tractors storming ashore under simulated shellfire. A tall
column of smoke mushroomed from a distant hill. McQueen, pointing to the smoke
“signal,” asked Applegarth, “What’s he say, Chief?”
“Him say him scalp-um white man,” grunted Applegarth in
appropriate Hollywood-Indian dialect.
From then on he was “Chief” to his friends. One night actors
Aldo Ray, Glenn Denning, Carleton Young and Applegarth shared a crowded tent.
After lights out somebody grumbled, “This is a helluva setup. We’ll have to
make more room somehow.”
“If we had a few cigars,” drawled another voice, “we could
stick ’em in Chief’s hand and stand him outside the door.”
Applegarth’s chuckles kept them awake half the night.
Generally Applegarth let someone else do the talking. His
economical “Yes” and “No” answers around the set and his built-in poker face,
an asset at card games, caused the crew to dub him “01’ Stoneface” and the
“Indian Gary Cooper.”
Rut one evening as the crowd sat sampling Puerto Rican rum
and swapping yarns Applegarth said he’d tell a story. The room hushed.
Applegarth began his joke—in Cree. He apologized and started over—in Cree.
Finally he gave up in confusion, explaining that it was a good story but it
wouldn’t come out in English.
After three and a half weeks on Vieques, the cast returned
to Hollywood
for local Marine camp scenes and Applegarth began to live like a wealthy
tourist. He had originally been promised $110 a week but this was raised to
$250. He sent five hundred dollars home to his wife and bought a new
wardrobe—slacks, sports shirts and two suits. On Easter Sunday he joined twenty
thousand others for the annual Roman Catholic sunrise service in the Hollywood
Howl. He saw the stage musical Rrigadoon and became a regular movie fan. He
went to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre four times and gazed at the footprints of Hollywood celebrities imprinted in the sidewalk outside.
McQueen and some friends drove him to Tijuana, Mexico,
one day to see horse races and cock fights. Another night they took him to San Diego and his first
burlesque show. He began to attend night clubs and discovered “you got to
polish your shoes, wear a white shirt and a tie and comb your hair real good or
they won’t serve you.” He could order drinks and enjoy Hollywood
society like any white man. If newcomers seemed uncertain how to act when Jonas
joined a party, Fess Parker broke the ice with, “Meet Jonas Applegarth. He’s a
Cree Indian from Canada.
Myself, I’m a Comanche.”
Around the Warner Brothers set he was acquiring prestige. He
delivered his lines competently and sometimes new lines were written especially
for him. One comedy scene in Battle Cry shows McQueen and Applegarth planning
to become blood brothers. The original script called for Applegarth to silently
produce a huge knife for the bloodletting, whereupon McQueen murmured weakly,
“Let’s wait till tomorrow.” But Applegarth brandished his knife with such gusto
that the writers gave him the line, “Okay, le’s see some blood.”
Another scene required Applegarth and his buddies to join in
boisterous song in a bar. Jonas, no thrush at his best, hadn’t rehearsed the
music and his off-key version rose above the others like a doleful war chant,
fortunately it made the drunken scene amusing and realistic. Director Walsh was
delighted and filmed the scene with few changes.
Recalling that triumph, Applegarth rumbles happily, “Yeah, I
stole that scene.”
A stand-in posed under the sweltering lights until the
cameras were ready; then actor Applegarth stepped forward, cool and composed. A
stunt man took his falls, for Applegarth the actor was no longer expendable as
Applegarth the extra had been.
He called the stars by their first names, went car riding
with Alan Ladd one night and gave his autograph to admiring little girls, big
girls and old girls who frequently asked if he lived in a tepee all year
around. He acquired an agent, Vernon Jacobson, who handles all his business
matters for ten percent.
When Battle Cry was finished, Parker, McQueen and a few
others held a party for him and advised, “Don’t stick around Hollywood between pictures, Chief. That sort
of thing has spoiled a lot of actors.” Jonas needed no urging. He’d had fun but
he was homesick. He picked up a cheque for back pay and caught a plane home.
Back in Alberta he avoided
large hotels, checking into a small place on the fringe of downtown Calgary. But in other
respects it was obvious that this was a new, worldly and wealthy Applegarth. He
chatted easily with reporter Myron Laka and conducted himself admirably in a
radio interview.
He ran out of cash on a Saturday morning and since the banks
were closed asked Arthur Hersh, the Warner Brothers representative, to cash the
pay cheque.
“How much?”
“Fifteen,” said Jonas casually.
“Fifteen dollars? Sure,” said Hersh, fumbling for his
wallet.
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” said Applegarth.
Hersh gulped, replaced his wallet and finally hunted up a
restaurant to cash the cheque.
At the reservation the Hobbema Crees held a dance in his
honor. Jonas made a speech saying he would continue to do his best to give
Hobbema a good name. He dropped in on his old cronies at Charlie’s Billiards
and answered eager questions about airplane travel and Hollywood
night life. He also gave a talk for the Catholic school pupils. He bought new
beds, chairs and a kitchen range for Helen, new clothes for Rachel and Bernice
and a half-ton truck for himself. Two weeks later he flew south for a part in
Drumbeat.
In Drumbeat, Applegarth was slated for a speaking part as a
medicine man. He proved too young for that role and simply played an ordinary
non-speaking Indian. For riding horseback, shooting cavalrymen and generally
conducting himself like a Hollywood Indian he earned $350 a week for five
weeks.
Taxes Took His Money
“Mr. Jacobson lined up a fine part for Jonas to start right
after Drumbeat,” says Carleton Young. “Also a fine raise in salary. But Jonas
told me he didn’t want to do the picture. Said he had to go home and farm.
There was no use telling him he could pay someone well to do his farming and
still have plenty of money left over, or that it was important to get himself
well established while he had the chance. His mind was made up. He was going
home and he did.”
By mid-July Applegarth was sitting on a corral rail at the
Hobbema annual rodeo, dressed in jeans, moccasins and felt hat like any other
Indian. Like the others he camped at the grounds for the two-day event,
sleeping in a tent, eating meals cooked over a wood fire, cuddling little
Bernice on his knee and gossiping in Cree with his neighbors. Of Hollywood he said merely,
“Oh, [’ll be going back in the fall sometime. It’s all right long as they pay
me. Money’s what counts.”
By that time most of his money was gone. Taxes took some and
Applegarth is not particularly thrifty. He was not worried, though, because he
knows a lucrative career awaits him if he wants it.
At first glance last summer it seemed that Applegarth didn’t
want a career; that he was content to play the part of Cree farmer. But it soon
became apparent that Hollywood is in his blood
and that Jonas is a Hollywood hero in Hobbema.
One evening on the reserva-
tion he produced a tangled armload of snapshots, press
clippings and souvenirs for me, while his Cree friend John Johnson looked on
admiringly.
There were photos of Applegarth and director Raoul Walsh,
Applegarth and Aldo Ray holding a West Indies
lobster, Applegarth in Marine battledress, Applegarth and Fess Parker reading
Variety. There were postcards of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Hollywood Bowl
and swank hotels. There was a card from a Mexican race track and an actors’
guild membership card. From time to time Applegarth dropped a first name like
“Van,” “Aldo” or “Alan.”
He thumbed through a Battle Cry script, proudly reading
extracts: “. . .then Lighttower—that’s me, Lighttower pulls knife from his boot
. . .”
Finally John Johnson could contain himself no longer.
“Boy!” he blurted. “That Jonas! He sure hit the jack pot.”
if
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