From Boot Hill to Hollywood Hills

Then enter, boys; cheerly, boys, enter and rest;
You know how we live, boys, and die in the west…
- George Pope Morris (1802-1864)


Growing old is nothing new. The human race has been aging for the past 200,000 years, give or take a millennium, but that doesn’t make getting old anything less of a personal issue. I’m going to be 54 this year, and that certainly doesn’t merit mention as a milestone - my mother is 80, my father will celebrate his 90th birthday later this year (2008) - but, after a half-century of existence, one can’t help but reflect on time allowed and time denied.

Which brings us to Boot Hill. Existing more as a modern-day tourist stop in once notorious cattle and mining boomtowns like Dodge City, Tombstone and Deadwood than as authentically historic landmarks, Boot Hill was the name given to a frontier cemetery wherein most of those laid to rest had died with their boots on, no doubt at the wrong end of a gun. Boot Hill - the name alone became a familiar part of the romance of the Old West, representing violent ends of reckless lives. Who wanted to die sick or old in bed with their boots off?

According to one fanciful account, Doc Holliday - a man whose volatile reputation had him pegged as someone who would surely die with his boots on - was dying of tuberculosis in a hospital bed when he looked down at his shoeless feet and remarked, "This is funny." In other folklore, after the famed gunfight at the OK Corral, fatally wounded 19-year-old Billy Clanton pleaded for someone to remove his boots, gasping, "I always told my mother I’d never die with my boots on!" Truer to the event, an eyewitness reported that Billy used his final breaths to writhe and kick in agony while screaming, "They’ve murdered me!"

But if you look at history, how many westerners actually died with their boots on? When it came to life expectancy, the cowboy heroes of my youth were lucky to reach my age. Even as recent as 1900, only one-half of children born in the U.S. could hope to live past 50.

Wild Bill Hickock was only 39 when he was shot down in 1876. Billy the Kid was killed in 1881 at the age of 21, and Jesse James was 34 when he was assassinated in 1882. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were both in their early 40s when they were (disputably) cut down by Bolivian troops in 1908.

There were, of course, notorious outlaws who beat the odds, including Frank James and Cole Younger, both of whom reached the age of 72. Emmett Dalton, who survived 23 bullet wounds in the infamous Coffeyville, Kansas, bank raids of 1892, lived to the ripe old age of 66.

A number of legendary lawmen likewise defied fate. Wyatt Earp was nearly 81 when he passed away. His friend Bat Masterson, who hung up his pistols to become a popular sports columnist for a New York City newspaper, succumbed quietly to a heart attack at his desk, age 67. Judge Roy Bean, the self-proclaimed "Law West of the Pecos," was in his late 70s when he passed in his sleep after a bout of heavy drinking. Western showman Buffalo Bill Cody died at the age of 70.

On the distaff side, bandit queen Belle Starr was just short of her 41st birthday when she was killed by an unknown assailant in 1889. Calamity Jane, depressive and alcoholic, died at the age of 61 in 1903. Annie "Little Sure Shot" Oakley was 66 when she passed away in 1926. And "Poker Alice" Ivers, a professional gambler famous for her fondness for big, black stogies, roamed from one frontier town to another and died at the age of 79 in 1930, following gall bladder surgery.

Among Native Americans, Crazy Horse was in his mid-30s when he was killed in 1872. Sitting Bull was shot to death at the age of 59 in 1890. Surprisingly, Geronimo lived to be 79.

From Boot Hill to the Hollywood Hills…In 1969, a popular film came out, depicting a band of aging gunmen at odds with a changing West. No, not "The Wild Bunch" (more on that one momentarily). It was "The Over-the-Hill Gang," a television movie that united screen old-timers Pat O’Brien, Walter Brennan, Chill Wills, Edgar Buchanan, and Andy Devine. The creaky romp was such a success with geriatric viewers that a year later, Brennan, Wills, Buchanan, and Devine returned in "The Over-the-Hill Gang Rides Again," with Fred Astaire replacing Pat O’Brien.

The notion of resuscitating fossily Hollywood careers on the dusty streets of horse opera backlots was not a new one. A producer named A.C. Lyles, who worked on the TV series "Rawhide," cranked out over a dozen low-budget westerns from 1964 to 1968, all noted for what one critic called second-rate pulp scripts. Shot in no more than 12 days, the movies - with rip-roarin’ titles like "Town Tamer," "Hostile Guns," "Bucksin," and "Arizona Bushwhackers" - were, in the words of Western Films author Brian Garfield, "overripe oaters" intended "strictly for nostalgics who are willing to sit through endless sophomoric foolishness to see all those old-timey actors," including Rory Calhoun, Dana Andrews, Yvonne De Carlo, Howard Keel, and Barry Sullivan, to name but a few. Mr. Lyles provided continuing employment for the likes of Lon Chaney Jr. as his troubled life spiraled downward from alcoholism, and, in the fading dusk of his career, Richard Arlen, best known as a pilot in the first Best Picture Oscar winner, 1927’s "Wings."

According to filmmaker C. Courtney Joyner, while many of the westerns of the 1960s "reflected a harsher social reality, the optimistic Lyles would have none of it in his films. He is the Champion of the B’s…who believes in the kind of movies that assured front-row kids that good guys win out in the end, and there is law for the lawless." Interestingly, one of Lyles’ most recent credits was as a "consulting producer" on "Deadwood," the controversial HBO-TV series noted for unflinching violence and explicit profanity, dropping the f-bomb 43 times in the first hour of its premiere.

Aside from the roster of veteran character actors, sidekicks and B-movie cowboy stars previously mentioned, the leads in A westerns, as they grew older, broached the prospect of aging in their latter screen roles. Gary Cooper, looking far older than his 51 years at the time, delivered an evocative portrayal of a past-his-prime lawman dealing with a young bride, an outlaw gang sworn to kill him, and a town that abandons him in "High Noon" (1952).

John Wayne, who had touched upon the onset of years in "True Grit" (1969), boldly confronted his own mortality with his role, at the age of 69, as a famed gunfighter dying of cancer in "The Shootist" (1976).

In 1968, 52-year-old Gregory Peck depicted an aging scout saddled with protecting a white woman rescued from years of Indian captivity, along with her son, from the boy’s vengeful Apache father in "The Stalking Moon." A couple of decades later, in "Old Gringo," Peck played writer Ambrose Bierce (best known as the author of the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"), who, in his twilight years, disappeared around 1914 in the whirlwind of the Mexican Revolution. The part was originally offered to Burt Lancaster, then 76, but because of his failing health, the studio refused to insure him. When he was in his 50s, Lancaster had essayed roles of aging westerners, in "Valdez Is Coming" (1971), "Ulzana’s Raid" (1972), and "Cattle Annie and Little Britches" (1981), in which he portrayed real-life outlaw Bill Doolin (who, in fact, was killed at the age of 38).

In 1970, 46-year-old Lee Marvin starred in "Monte Walsh" as a graying cowhand who refuses to compromise in a changing West, where, as his pal tells him, "Nobody gets to be a cowboy forever." The film was similar in melancholic tone to 1968’s "Will Penny," starring Charlton Heston as an old saddle tramp weary of frontier hardships. In 1992, 62-year-old Clint Eastwood bid an elegiac farewell to westerns as a one-time gunslinger hired for one last ride in "Unforgiven."

The year 1972 saw no less than four movies about aging rodeo stars contending with their fates in the new West, namely "Junior Bonner," with Steve McQueen, "J.W. Coop," directed by and starring Cliff Robertson, "The Honkers," with James Coburn, and "When the Legends Die," starring Richard Widmark. Clark Gable’s last role (at 60) was as a world-weary horse wrangler in contemporary Nevada in "The Misfits" (1961). In 1984, 53-year-old Robert Duvall won an Oscar as a down-and-out country singer who finds unlikely redemption in a small Texas town in "Tender Mercies."

Truth be told, Mr. Duvall is our favorite old-timer. Born in San Diego in 1931, he made an unforgettable but wordless feature film debut as Boo Radley in "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962). Distantly related to Gen. Robert E. Lee (whom he portrayed in 2005’s "Gods and Generals") and once proclaimed "America’s Laurence Olivier," he had memorable roles in such westerns as "True Grit," "Joe Kidd," and "The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid" (as a cowardly Jesse James). It was in his late 50s and into his 70s that he appeared in what he considered his personal trilogy of westerns, "Lonesome Dove" (1989), "Open Range" (2003), and "Broken Trail" (2006), portraying ornery cusses who, despite advancing age and expanding girth, could be counted on when the chips are down.

"When you side with a man you stay with him. And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal! You’re finished!" So said William Holden as the leader of "The Wild Bunch" (1969), director Sam Peckinpah’s stark portrait of men of the West who have outlived their time. In 1962, Peckinpah made "Ride the High Country," starring 64-year-old Randolph Scott (in his last role) and 57-year-old Joel McCrea as long-in-the-tooth gunfighters with seemingly disparate moral codes hired to guard a gold shipment. The film introduced the director’s favorite theme of aging outsiders caught in the death throes of the Old West - a motif eloquently explored elsewhere in director John Ford’s "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962), starring John Wayne and James Stewart, and "Lonely Are the Brave" (1962), with Kirk Douglas as a modern-day maverick on horseback fleeing a posse armed with 20th-century technology.

Peckinpah biographer David Weddle noted that Sam would "extend and refine" this theme in later films, most famously in his masterpiece, "The Wild Bunch." Born into a California ranching family that included cattlemen, judges, stagecoach drivers and lawyers, Peckinpah was instilled with an undying passion for the losing battle between old-fashioned values and modern materialism. His western films (which also included "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") were often set in the early 20th century and were peopled with peppery characters who saw the precious traditions of the Old West swept away by the new industrialized and politicized America. "The day of the steady businessman has arrived," one character laments in "Ride the High Country." In "The Wild Bunch," William Holden declares, "We’ve got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast."

During his brief 59 years, Peckinpah abused drugs, booze, actors and producers. His clashes with studio executives were the stuff of legend. Early in his career, Sam, in a whiskey-fueled philosophical discussion with Brian Keith, concluded he was born about a hundred years too late. Critic Roger Ebert once noted that Sam, like his Wild Bunch, "was an obsolete, violent, hard-drinking misfit with his own code, and did not fit into the new world of automobiles and Hollywood studios."

Two weeks after he died (on December 28, 1984), relatives, friends, and those he had worked with gathered for a tribute. Among the guests were Lee Marvin, James Coburn, Ali MacGraw, Robert Culp, Brian Keith, and director Don Siegel. Mariette Hartley, who made her screen debut at the age of 22 in "Ride the High Country," quoted her favorite line from the film, spoken by Joel McCrea: "All I want is to enter my house justified." She added, "Well, you have, Sam."