Path lit by lightning, p.49
Path Lit by Lightning, page 49
As Jim became more of a presence in Hollywood, the press came calling. Whether he was down on his luck or on the rebound, sooner or later they found him to be good copy. George Kirksey, sportswriter for UPI, visited Thorpe on the set of a movie eventually titled The Daring Young Man, starring James Dunn and Mae Clark. The story was of a newspaperman who on the eve of marrying a woman reporter from a rival paper accepted an assignment to go undercover in jail to expose violent gangs behind bars. Thorpe played convict No. 13,111. When Kirksey arrived, director William Seiter was on one end of the set working a scene while prison-clad extras gathered around a table at the other end shooting dice. Thorpe, he observed, “looked on amusedly at the game but didn’t shake when his turn came.” At a break for lunch, they talked.
Kirksey asked about football. Jim had not played since that disappointing game with the Chicago Cardinals on Thanksgiving Day 1928. He said he rarely paid attention to the sport anymore. The NFL had not yet reached the West Coast and he seldom went to the Coliseum or Rose Bowl to watch Southern Cal or UCLA. No fat-man verbiage from this writer; he thought Jim looked in “fairly good condition.” Jim said he was “out kicking the ball around the other day” with his boys and some other kids from the neighborhood. “I can still kick it and pass it but I guess I’m too old to play,” he said. Jim’s boys Phil, Billy, and Dick were eight, six, and two. He was almost forty-eight.
The outdoor track and field season in 1935 got Jim ruminating about his Olympic experience in Stockholm nearly a quarter century earlier—and the new generation of American athletes preparing to compete on the world stage at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. What had happened to the trophies from the tsar of Russia and king of Sweden that Jim had been forced to return? Someone had told him they were in the king’s palace in Stockholm. Over the years his belief that he was unfairly punished and deserved the trophies intensified. He had started a campaign on his own behalf during the Bunion Derby that took him to Los Angeles in 1929, but soon dropped the effort; now he revived it, paying a visit to P. N. Engblom, vice consul of Sweden at the consulate in Los Angeles, to ask how he might retrieve the trophies. An investigation requested by the Swedes discovered that the trophies had been offered to the second-place finishers in the pentathlon and decathlon, F. R. Bie of Norway and Hugo Wieslander of Sweden, who had declined to take them, saying only that they belonged to Thorpe.
Nothing reminded Jim of his glory days in Stockholm more than the emergence of Jesse Owens of Ohio State, an incandescent all-around track and field star in the sprints and broad jump. At the Big Ten championship meet at Ann Arbor that spring, Owens broke three world records and tied another within less than an hour, an unprecedented feat for which the press pronounced him the greatest ever.
The accolades made Jim take notice. He was being supplanted in the public imagination, a situation that brought out his competitiveness. Owens was “a marvelous athlete,” Thorpe said, acknowledging that the young black man’s marks in the sprints and broad jump were superior to his best. But Jim insisted that in his prime, if he were “twenty years younger and fifty pounds lighter,” he could win a two-man meet. “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “In my day we didn’t think about records. We ran or jumped or threw weights to win. When somebody pressed me, I set a record. When they didn’t, I just won.” There was some truth to that; throughout his career, Jim calibrated his effort to what it would take to win. And if the matchup were a true all-around contest, he would prevail in the weight events. But it was wishful thinking that he could outrun or outjump Jesse Owens.
If only. But Jim was not twenty years younger and fifty pounds lighter. A wirephoto in newspapers around the nation showed Thorpe on the set of the movie She with stars Randolph Scott and Helen Gahagan (the future Democratic politician Helen Gahagan Douglas, defeated by Richard Nixon in his red-baiting 1950 U.S. Senate race in California). The film, a bizarre allegory about the fallacy of eternal life, taking place in a fantastical ice palace in the frozen north, was supposed to be a breakthrough for Jim. Press reports boasted that he would have a leading role. In fact, his few lines as captain of the guards of “the ancient civilization of Kor” were unintelligible, his tribal costume and severe makeup rendered him virtually unrecognizable, and the press focused instead on his girth. The caption: “JIM THORPE’S MISSING NO MEALS. That rather portly gent in the rear is Jim Thorpe, though you might not recognize the super-husky once greatest all-round athlete, with that extra om-bom-pwom, as the French have it, added to his mighty frame.”
The debate over whether the United States should participate in the Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany had begun by then. Jewish organizations demanded a boycott on the grounds that the racist and antisemitic policies of Hitler’s government were unconscionable and contradicted the expressed ideals of the Olympic movement. But in opposing the boycott, Hitler found a strong ally in Avery Brundage, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. While arguing publicly that the Olympics should transcend politics, Brundage worked diligently behind the scenes spreading Nazi propaganda and claiming that the American press was sensationalizing Hitler’s atrocities.
This was the Avery Brundage who had competed against Thorpe in the decathlon in Stockholm—and was trounced by him before withdrawing prematurely—and who since rising to power in the Olympics movement had thwarted Jim’s efforts to get his records restored and medals returned, a stance he would take for the rest of his career. Thorpe and Brundage were teammates in Stockholm but never close. When Brundage wrote about the friendships he made during the 1912 Olympics, his favorites were the German athletes Carl Diem and Karl Ritter von Halt, who went on to become influential Nazis and leaders of the organizing committee for the Berlin games.
Thorpe’s position on whether America should take part in the games evolved. In a story tilting heavily to Brundage’s side, a correspondent for the New York Daily News wrote that Thorpe “has no sympathy to waste on those who would have the United States refuse to participate in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.” Jim’s reasoning had more to do with what he saw as American tolerance than German intolerance, though he seemed naïve about Nazi antisemitism, quoted as calling it a “religious controversy.” Americans should disregard any differences, he said, “just as we have always disregarded the race, color, religion, or local affiliation of any and all athletes we have sent to the Olympics in the past.”
Some of the statements attributed to Thorpe in the news article seemed concocted by the author. There was no byline on the story, but it was likely Sidney Skolsky, the Hollywood reporter for the Daily News, who had included a tidbit about Thorpe in a separate gossip column after visiting him on the set of Barbary Coast, a film in which Jim was an uncredited extra playing an Indian janitor toting mop and pail. The concluding quote from Thorpe in the Olympics piece sounded as if it could have been written by Brundage: “Probably there were differences of opinion and politics among the ancient Greeks in those days. But such periods pass. The games go on. This period will pass. When it has passed followers of sport and fair play will be glad nothing interrupted the games this time. Let’s keep out of the Old World affairs, especially out of affairs that might lead to bad feeling.”
“The games must go on” would become Brundage’s trademark phrase, one he uttered most unforgettably thirty-six years later after eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by Arab terrorists at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. Considering what had happened to Thorpe after Stockholm, “fair play” was not the first thought that came to his mind when the subject was the Olympics. In the event, his position seemed to change—or was soon clarified. “Our athletes should not be exposed to whatever may develop in Berlin,” Thorpe said when he was asked again months later.
After seeing Jim’s name in Skolsky’s column, Grace Wilcox paid a visit to the Thorpe home in July 1935. Wilcox was the newly minted Hollywood bureau chief for Screen and Radio Weekly, a nationally syndicated supplement published by the Detroit Free Press. She was trying to establish her credentials against Skolsky and Hedda Hopper, both of whom had just arrived on the Hollywood writing scene, along with the reigning queen of movieland gossip, Louella Parsons.
“The other day I went out to see Jim Thorpe…” Wilcox told her readers. Jim and Freeda were gracious hosts, the three boys on best behavior. “It was like being transported to a new and different world—a world in which simplicity, charm and love make a home fit for a king. Their small, neat cottage and the sandwiches, tea and cake served us as a gesture of true hospitality gave me a sense of satisfaction that no elaborate dinner in a palace has ever done. Jim Thorpe and his lovely little wife have found true happiness. They joke with each other, have their own private stock of wisecracks which they bring forward on the slightest provocation, and their three little boys live in an atmosphere of gentle gayety.”
When Wilcox asked Jim if he missed the athletic life, he laughed and pointed to a photograph of him playing with his sons. “They keep me athletic answering their questions,” he said. “Besides, I have to feed them.”
“And I have to feed all of them,” said Freeda, also laughing.
Wilcox noted Jim’s role as a leader for many of the Indians seeking employment in Hollywood. “Chief of the tribe,” she called him. She said Jim told her that many of the Indians were “fairly contented” with how they were treated in Hollywood—when in fact he and they were constantly pushing for better pay and equitable treatment. She noted that he had “an important role” in Barbary Coast—when in truth it was uncredited. She was struck by how Jim explained his place in society by telling the story of one friend asking him if he’d married an American girl. “No,” he replied. “A girl of the United States consented to marry me—an American.”
Were Jim and Freeda role-playing to impress a visitor? Their marriage had strains that a guest could not see, from Jim’s absences to his financial struggles to his occasional bouts of drinking that would render him useless for days, and the boys often went weeks and even months without him. They suffered from his uneven parenting. Phil later told the writer Paul Zimmerman about a time their father took the boys fishing at the Redondo Beach pier. When they bragged that they could swim twenty miles out to Catalina Island, Jim responded to their boasting by throwing them off the pier. “Actually, we couldn’t swim worth a damn,” Phil recalled, but when they screamed for help their father ignored them. “The beach is that way,” he said, pointing, and they barely struggled back to shore.
Nothing idyllic in any of that. But the Wilcox column was nonetheless a reminder that family relationships were a complicated mix of love and disappointment, endearment and dysfunction. The private language Jim and Freeda used went back to the days of their long-distance courtship when he was playing baseball in the twilight league in Massachusetts and writing letters home to his “Krazy Kitten.” If it was spoken less often inside the home, the argot was not forgotten. But Freeda, who’d entered the relationship as a teenager worshipping a sports idol, also understood the importance of maintaining Jim’s public image, especially when it came to writers from the movie industry. Hollywood was essential to the family’s survival. Sometimes Jim found work there for all of them as extras portraying an Indian family. In such cases he did not complain when Freeda was made up to look Native American.
After a trip to the Midwest during that period, Jim returned with the youngest of his daughters, Grace, who felt increasingly out of place in the home of her mother and stepfather, Mr. and Mrs. Davies. She asked to join Jim in California and finish high school there. Jim met her in Oklahoma. They stopped first to see Jim’s sister Big Mary, who lived in a cabin near the original family homestead along the North Canadian. No running water or electricity, an outhouse and water pump in back, light provided by kerosene lamps, clothes washed in No. 10 tubs. Mary cooked them a fried squirrel breakfast before they began the long drive west. “You have to understand the Indian people don’t stop overnight; we don’t have the money,” Grace later recalled. At sunrise after Jim had been at the wheel through the night, he turned to Grace and announced that this was the perfect time for her to learn to drive. “I was fourteen at the time and eagerly said, ‘Okay.’ He showed me where the brake was and how to hold the steering wheel and give it the gas. Then he put it in gear and watched me for a few minutes to see if I was all right with a car coming and climbed into the back seat and went to sleep.”
* * *
MAYBE THE END of the trail was instead an endless loop. Consider that once, when Jim’s first love, Iva Miller, was eleven years old, she spent a summer at the world’s fair in St. Louis entertaining white people at the American Indian exhibit by pretending she lived in a wigwam and taking part in daily performances of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Nearby the ancient and broken-down Indian prisoner of war Geronimo danced to the beat of a big drum and sold postcards with his signature for a dime apiece. That was in 1904. Eleven years later, in San Francisco, came the unveiling of the most popular exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, sculptor James Earle Fraser’s The End of the Trail, an eighteen-foot-high statue of an Indian on horseback slumped in defeat, meant to establish the inevitability of manifest destiny while romanticizing the vanishing of America’s indigenous people.
Now came a third variation on the theme in 1935 as San Diego hosted the California Pacific International Exposition. The world was on display across the three-hundred-acre fairgrounds, with exhibits replicating almost anything that could be imagined. Here was Spain’s El Moro Gardens. There was a House of Charm where the “beauty of woman is on an imaginary pedestal and unconsciously you bow down and worship before the shrine.” Across the way crowds enjoyed a sprawling version of New York’s Coney Island amusement park. Then they could gawk at a village populated by midgets imported from overseas. Finally, in the middle of it all, stood an Indian village whose entrance proclaimed THE END OF THE TRAIL.
Enticed by the pounding of big drums, visitors encountered “150 [Native Americans] of almost twenty different tribes.” The Indians, a mix of authentic artisans and reenactors, wove rugs, blankets, and baskets, threw pottery, and knapped arrowheads. “From time to time,” noted one report, “the village will be the abode of Indians whose names are linked with the romance of America.” One played the role of Black Hawk, the great Sac and Fox warrior from a century earlier. And for a few days, when tourists reached “The End of the Trail,” they could see Black Hawk’s most famous descendant, Jim Thorpe, playing the role of Jim Thorpe. Or at least a Wild West version of him. Jim was not there to exhibit his athletic prowess. He was paid to don a headdress and moccasins and other accoutrements of the Thunder Clan and perform the Eagle Dance and sign autographs, a spectacle not all that different from old man Geronimo’s in 1904.
The duality of honoring his ancestry while performing as a white man’s version of an Indian was a situation Jim had dealt with all his adult life. From his earliest days playing football at Carlisle, the white press had described Thorpe in the violent imagery of tomahawks and scalpings and portrayed the school’s coeds as “winsome squaws”—aware or not that the latter word was a derogatory and condescending label. Indians connoted the wild and exotic. Those Swedish girls who encountered Jim near the practice grounds in Stockholm would not believe he was an Indian until he scared them off with wild war whoops. Oorang Indians, World Famous Indians, Harjo’s Indians, Hollywood Indians—all performances that mixed indigenous tradition with white expectations and financial opportunity. It was that combination of factors that also led Jim and Chief Many Treaties to participate in a Fourth of July Wild West show in Southern California where they came as “feather-plumed” Indians to hang out with an aging group of former outlaws, including Emmett Dalton from Oklahoma’s Dalton Gang and bank robber Al Jennings. And it was what motivated Jim to help organize a three-day powwow that drew hundreds of Indians from scores of tribes to Broadway Park near his home in Hawthorne, where they camped and celebrated with parades and beauty contests and traditional games and dances.
* * *
“LO, THE POOR Indian, he can’t even play himself in the movies, mournfully complained Jim Thorpe….”
So began a United Press account of the day Jim visited the offices of the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles in 1936 to seek legal help in his long-running fight with the studios. He and Cecilia Blanchard, an Oklahoma Shawnee friend who lived near him in Hawthorne, were running a loosely organized casting agency representing a few hundred Hollywood Indians. At the meeting with Pierson M. Hall, the federal prosecutor, Jim noted a survey conducted by the Labor Department establishing that only four in ten people hired to play Indians were Native Americans. Hall was partially sympathetic, saying he thought Thorpe had a justified complaint, but he believed there was nothing he could do because the studios were not breaking federal law. Translating Hall’s response into the white version of Indian-speak, the wire service said he told Thorpe he would refer the issue to “the Great White Father” in Washington.
The problem involved more than who was hired for Indian roles. Studio executives seemed to be turning away from cowboy and Indian movies, deeming them passé. “There are only a few pictures each year we can work in, and when they use white men it means we can’t make a living,” Thorpe said. The second assertion was more accurate than the first, but the number of western films was shrinking. One major production bucking the trend was The Plainsman, an extravaganza directed by Cecil B. DeMille that tapped into the hoary myths of the West with a fictionalized story that intermingled Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane, and General George Armstrong Custer. The film starred Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, and Charles Bickford, with young Anthony Quinn, in his first year as an actor, playing an Indian.
In this case, it was not just the hiring of the Mexican American Quinn for an Indian role that bothered Jim, but something more complicated—the fact that DeMille bypassed Thorpe and his troupe of Hollywood Indians and instead used a band of Cheyenne on location in Montana. Apparently without appreciating the paradox, DeMille said he “wanted Indians that looked like real Indians, not the Hollywood variety.” Jim found that argument disingenuous, noting that the Hollywood Indians depended on the work as their livelihood, while the Cheyenne did not, and he and most of his troupe could speak tribal languages and ride bareback.
