Golden Scorpion
Hollywood in 1954 — memories from my four year-old self.
Mom was going to be a movie star. I was four and my brother, Mike, six. Mom made up beds for us in the back of the car and we drove all night to Santa Monica from Phoenix where we had been living for a year since leaving our dad in Iowa. Dad had been a war hero, but when he came home he got mad too easy, so we had to leave him. He followed us to Arizona and he came to play with us one afternoon in the pool at our apartment. That was the last time I ever saw him, a big man that could throw us squealing with laughter across the pool.
For a while we stayed in a small hotel across from the Ocean while Mom got ready to star as the Golden Scorpion in a pilot film. Mike and I played in the ocean for the first time ever.
I ran up the beach to Mom, stationed on our towels. “Mom, I saw it! I saw it!”
“What, Sweetheart?”
“The under toe!”
“What did it look like?”
“Green! And it wrapped around my big toe! But I escaped.”
“I think that was seaweed,” Mike said.
“But it looked like a big green toe!”
“You can’t see the undertow,” Mom explained, but that just made it scarier.
One afternoon, Mom laid out two sets of Cowboy pistols and holsters on the bed. One was obviously for kids with two six shooters in an elaborate holster belt with fake silver studs. The other was a single revolver in a well oiled leather holster.
“Which one do you want?” Mom asked.
“I slid the Remington Colt out of the leather holster and thrilled to its weight. It was the real deal. “I want this one.”
Her strategy had backfired. “Sorry, Honey. I need that one for the movie, so you get the one with two pistols.” She picked the revolver out of my hands, returned it to its sheath, and fixed the kids holster belt around my waist. “There. That one fits you best.”
“What about this? Can I have one of these?” I picked up the gold-colored, leather, braided, nine-foot long whip.
“No, dear. That’s what I’m going to use on the bad guys. When I whip the gun out of their hand, it will leave the mark of the scorpion on them.”
“Wow.” This was all so cool.
Her golden cowboy pants and shirt hugged the contours of her curves as she strapped on the six-shooter and fastened the whip to the gun belt. She fixed her gold cowboy hat on her raven black hair and gave me a lopsided smile. “How do I look, pardner?”
“Like a movie star.”
“Okay! Let’s go to the rodeo, Buckaroo.”
At the rodeo, Mike and I sat in the stands and watched a line of cowboys and cowgirls ride into the ring. One cowboy flew the American flag and Mom rode near the front of the parade. They raced across the hard packed dirt smiling and waving. Halfway across Mom’s hat flew off. Mom cut her horse out from the speeding line and circled back. She dashed toward the lonely hat in the middle of the arena, leaned out from the saddle, swept up the hat, snapped back up into the saddle and held the hat high as her horse thundered on. The crowd roared. She placed her hat on her head, spun her black stallion, and galloped toward the exit. With half the arena left to cover, she dropped both feet off the side of the horse and bounced off the earth sending her flying over to the other side where she repeated the trick and landed in the saddle. The fans wet wild. She was young and beautiful. She had been a gymnast, dancer, horsewoman, pilot, and now, a rodeo queen. She was my hero.
We often visited Mom’s movie set in the hills outside L.A., an old western town and a cavalry fort, which was also the set for Rin Tin Tin. I was always on the lookout for the famous dog, “Yo Rinny!” I would yell to know one in particular to see if he might appear. It was fun to climb on the log walls of the Fort, but the town was silly because the buildings only had fronts to them.
Mom enrolled us at Marymount Catholic school, a year early for me to be in kindergarten. After a month they moved me into first grade, because I was so bored I kept falling asleep. I enjoyed learning how to speak French. The words were so slippery, but not as slippery as the canned spinach the nuns made us eat.
By the next summer, the pilot was finished, but our Hollywood dreams came to an end. I blamed the greasy man with the pencil mustache, Mom’s agent. But Mom said cowgirls weren’t popular anymore. All the studios wanted animal stories. The new season of shows featured Lassie, Fury, My Friend Flicka, and Rin Tin Tin. We slunk back to Iowa on the train, to live with Grandma for a year. Mom was still my hero.
