The Windsor Star from Windsor, Ontario, Canada • 41

The Windsor Star Windsor-Thefsday- December 9 1974 Pages 41 to 52 Jvi' ft I I I 'Publicity was not my reason for doing it' 'Yd rather have leprosy than rodeo fever By RAY BENNETT Sacheen Littlefeather is the Indian girl Marlon Brando sent along to the Oscar show to refuse an offer he felt they should never have made naming him best actor for The Godfather. Brando, in typically perverse manner, turned down the award on the grounds that Hollywood has treated Indians badly in its movies. Sacheen, in Indian costume and a beaded headband, braved the movie capital's establishment as his messenger. It looked like a marvellous publicity stunt for the trained actress who was going nowhere fast in movies and happened to be both exceptionally pretty and In-dian, well, at least, half Indian. But with a few small roles in movies now under her belt, including one in Tom Laughlin's phenomenally successful The Trial of Billy Jack, Sah Sacheen, 28, insists she didn't do her Oscar number for the publicity.

"Publicity was not my reason for doing it. It was, simply a favor for a friend," she says. She met friend Brando through Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and says that the incident with the Academy Awards has had both positive and negative results. "On the positive side I became infamous because of that 60-second speech, but the negative was that people began thinking that I was a militant, an activist, which I'm not. I got caught in a political crossfire and people weren't offering me jobs." Things have improved now, though, with the Billy Jack film, in which she plays an activist Indian lawyer, and roles in two other upcoming pictures, Firecloud, with Ralph Meeker and Vic Mohica, and Winterhawk, with Leif Erickson.

"I had a part in the' James Caan-Alan Arkin film Freebie and the Bean. I played a masseuse, there were about 10 of us playing masseuses in a scene in which we were raided, but they cut it out and I gues I'm not in the picture now. That's the trouble in this business. Unless you make friends with the editor you're dead," she says. The Oscar episode wasn't the first elaborate stunt Sacheen's been involved with.

In 1969 she beat nearly 1,000 girls to become Miss Vampire of America in a competition organized to publicize the television show Dark Shadows. "There was a lot of work involved," she says. "I had to work up a whole routine, 1 thought at would be hokey but in a theatrical sense it was quite a feat. I had my teeth done and did a two-hour make-up job." Sacheen says she has been acting since she was four years old and started modelling when she was' 17. Beyond that she's been a freelance radio newswoman, waitress, a cook and a secretary.

"Anything to keep going," she laughs. Sacheen laughs a lot as she talks, her brown eyes shining above high Apache cheekbones. Things weren't always so easy to laugh at. Her mother, the daughter of a German Catholic couple married a White Mountain Apache named Cruz wbo died when Sacheen was very young. Sacheen Littlefeather heartily of rodeo life.

And yet, his son, just never could drop the idea. "As far as incurable diseases go," says Jim Hill dragging deep on a cigarette, "I'd rather have leprosy then rodeo fever. There's a challenge aspect I can't quite explain. It's like cancer. It eats you alive." He finished high school, joined the Marine Corps 3 and wassent to' Vietnam, "which was just like a green prison." Then he came home and did what he always dreamed of doing.

He likes bull riding the best. Bareback bronco riding the least. "But it's bareback ridin' that pays the bills." In Fort Pierce he placed second there, broken toe and all. But it's anyone's guess why any sane man would love a rodeo. You have to stay on a bucking bull or a'bareback bronco exactly eight seconds, after which you must remove your body from the beast by either flinging yourself on another (tamer) horse or if you're riding a bull by just flinging yourself onto the soft earth beneath.

There are some 15,000 rodeos a year in the U.S. but that's including all those high school and college and amateur numbers. As far as professionals go, they must join one of two main rodeo leagues: the International Rodeo Association (which Longhorn, owned by country singer Loretta Lynn, belongs to) or the Rodeo Cowboy Association. And if you pay your 50 bucks a year to join one of those, as does Jim Hill, then you're entitled to all the privileges of the pro: the ability to earn about $6,500 a year (as does Jim Hill), or about $68,000 a year (as do the very top stars). Out of that $6,500 you pay a lot of medical insurance, and a possible future in shoeing horses.

Jim Hilt says that's just what he might do when he's through with it all. Shoe horses. It pays about 15 bucks a head. And the deft horseshoer can do about four a day. "Used to worry about fear," says Jim Hill as he puts on his blue neckscarf, his spurs, and his long floppy chaps.

He doesn't any more. Worry about it, that is. But he still fears. And yet today he just knows it is his lucky day. There were 8,500 screaming kids in the stands at the Armory it's a special performance sponsored by the Jaycees and they're saving their highest pitches for bull-riding which comes at the end.

Hill is competing against Jack Wiseman, the bull-riding champ of the IRA, so it's going to be tough, and he knows it. He mounts the bull, a huge black creature of about 1600 pounds with the unlikely name of Buck Wheat. And then it starts. The whole process takes only ubout seven seconds and is over before you know it. Jim Hill is flat on his buck on the ground and Buck Wheat is stepping on his left ribcage the one that includes the two ribs that were broken just a few months back in New York, Minutes later he is standing leaning, really against the rail, his sweaty, blackened face partially buried in his arms.

"Thought you had it. Thought you'd do it for sure," says one friendly cowboy. But Jim Hill is unable to respond. After a few minutes, he lifts his head slowly, painfully and gives a passing woman a wink and a flashing smile. But that's more habit than yen.

The eyes wince, the head sinks down once again. He still has trouble talking, Two young girls walk up to him. They stop, they stare, they shove a' pad under his nose. "Give us your autograph," they say. "And sign it: 'The Man Who Fell Off The Bull" Jim Hill takes the pad and because he is a very chivalrous man, really grabs a pen and does what he's told.

By JUDY BACHRACH of The Washington Post WASHINGTON He is not alone. There are about 6,000 like him. Professional cowboys who move from rodeo to rodeo, hoping to win, or at least, to place. They are young because they have to be young. By 40, those bull-riding days are generally over and riding bucking broncos bareback becomes an Increasingly difficult and uncomfortable way of earning a buck.

Six hundred bucks a month says one cowboys, is about average, Jim Hill figures he's going to quit at 32. It's that kind of life. "Oh it's my lucky day," says Jim Hill with a smile. 'Oh yes, I can feel it. My motor's running." He smiles again shyly this time.

He's got a pair of dice in his pocket, but they won't help. Jim Hill, after almost four years in the business that had endowed him with a broken nose, two collapsed lungs, cracked and broken ribs at the moment a broken toe which he got just a few weeks back in Bangor, Maine, is in very good spirits. He is 25 years old. "Know how much I got in my pocket? Five bucks, that's all. In rodeo livin' you spend everythin' you make." He laughs and shrugs.

He more or less had to win the bull-riding contest at the Longhorn rodeo at the Washington Armory. Either that or the bareback riding contest. "But 1 just know I'm gonna win. Sure you gotta go in like that, optimistic. If you don't, you gotta give up right away.

But if I didn't, I guess I'll have to just borrow from my pardners." There are three of those and they all ride around with him in a big camper travelling from rodeo to rodeo: D.C., Fort Pierce, Madison Square Garden, you name it. There is one big bed in the camper: "And two of us stay up drivin and two of us sleep. And if we can't find anyone to put us up for the night when we get some place why then we find us a motel." And so it sounds like sort of a lonely life. "Oh but it isn't oh no. Well because you know there are sort of groupies who hang aroun'.

And the way I figger it, the better my bull, the better the groupie. Now the world's champion's gonna get a belter shot at women than I would. And I'd get a better shot than Johnny Hometown. But there's still chivalry. I mean you still gotta ask a girl out and all that." And yes, it's easy to see why a rodeo groupie would go for the likes of Jim Hill even if he never placed: He's got pleasant ways and a pleasant He is tanned, lean, small-hipped and yet oddly bereft of that hard hungry look common to his fellow cow-boys.

One of the hungriest looking ones drops by the table and gives Hill a cowboy handshake (thumbs up) "Hiya doin' pardnuh?" Just theught I'd drop in an' watch. Well it costs too much to enter and I don't think I'd win." "Matter of fact, don't know his name," says Hill when the cowboy leaves. "But he sure knows mine. You know one of the rodeo world champs once said that only 10 per cent of all cowbbys'll ever make it in the rodeo. And they depend on the other 90 per cent to do it.

Well he's in the 90 per cent." And is Hill 10 percent? Jim Hill grins. "Like to think I am. Sure would like to." In Union City, which Jim Hill calls home, they don't like their boys acting boastful. Hill says there aren't many cowboys hailing from Tennessee, so that makes him sort of a rarity. It also hurt his career some "because in some places, like Texas, rodeo is as common as Little League for kids." But at the age of 5, Jim Hill was given his own horse by his father, a restaurateur, who disapproved "I was raised by my mother's parents," she says.

"My mother's name was Marie and I was named Marie, too, but everyone called me by my nickname, Sacheen. My father was the Indian in the family and our tribe all has Spanish names because the Spanish Christians conquered us in the South West. "They call us the 'chili-eaters of the South west' and we are a different kind of Indian. The Plains Indians are pretty tall but we are not. My mother is six feet tall.

I have the build of my mother and the face of my father. People ask me, 'are you an I say, no, I'm an Apache!" Sacheen's parents were saddlemakers and her tribe's economy largely involves horses. "We learned a lot about horses when we stole them from the Spanish," she smiles. "My father was deaf and I started to act for him when I was very small in order to communicate with him. I was talking with some others who have deaf parents and we agreed that we all tend to over-enunciate when we are talking, we use facial expressions, our hands and our bodies to communicate.

And I also find that I'm in the habit of being over-repetitive. But being deaf or mute isn't really understood in the United States. It's another minority. Sacheen's grandmother used to cull lettuce in the workshop of Salinas, California, when home was a cardboard shack. "Poverty has a way of bringing down racial barriers.

1 had tuberculosis when I was four, and trenchmouth and scabies, they were just a thing you got whether you were clean or dirty. I thought everyone got them. There was no indoor plumbing, no bathroom. When I was seven we got our first toilet. I brought the neighbors in to show them.

I used to flush the toilet as a treat. "Itwas a crazy way to grow up but it taught me a lot. I thought I grew up in a neighborhood, but I found out it was a ghetto. But when you grow up in poverty you need a sense of humor to survive. That's one thing everybody can do, everyone can laugh and I love to laugh." A sense of humor came in handy, too, when poverty was 'way behind her, when she found herself on Mount Tamapaias high above the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, naked, posing for Playboy magazine.

"People ask me if I got much exposure from doing that. I tell them, yes, and I also got a cold. A freelance Playboy photographer took some pictures of me about a year and a half before the Oscar thing but Hugh Hefner didn't think they were erotic enough. I told them that was as erotic as 1 got. But after the Oscar show he still had the prints and I had signed a model's release so I had to go along with the whole program.

"The photographer was wearing a down coat but I was standing there with nothing on and it was 35 degrees. I was shaking, freezing. We did about 750 shots altogether. My husband (engineer Michael Rubio) had set up the working arrangements with Playboy and didn't mind. He yawned.

But I'd never do anything like it again. Not because of any criticism, but because of the cold." 1 1 lite NO OSCAR Sacheen Littlefeather, as Marlon Brando's spokesman, created a storm last year when s.he read his refusal of an Oscar awarded to him for his work in The Godfather. She insists it wasn't a publicity gag..