The South Bend Tribune from South Bend, Indiana • 65

SCREEN ft RADIO WEEKLY Though she works with animals, Miss Reed confesses to an abhorrence of snakes. Unknowingly, she was lured into a scene with a rattlesnake in "Call Her Savage" with Clara Bow. The trainer assured her the reptile was without fangs. After she went through the scene with It, the snake bit the trainer. She has crashed and turned over motor cars, driven cars and motorcycles through fences, leaped from the deck of a boat into raging seas, dived into the water from dizzy heights, made delayed parachute jumps.

Once, on a barnstorming tour such as she sometimes makes around the country during the summer, she drove a locomotive head on into another at the Brockton (Mass.) Fair, leaping just before the engines came together, escaping with a broken thumb. Ironically, the only time she has been seriously hurt was when for her own pleasure she went swimming and dived into shallow water, fracturing several Vertebrae. "I'm stunting," said Miss Wiggins, 'first, because it's full of excitement and I like excitement, next because I can make a better living at it than I probably could at HJiythinf; 1st- O. 'N'K of the most frightening of all close calls that stunt girls have had was that of Betty Danko, formerly of Newark, N. nine years In films.

Doubling for Patsy Kelly at Hal Roach's studio, Miss Danko, an attractive brunet, was called upon to work with a puma, or mountain lion. No animal trainer herself, she had to rely on the puma's owner. After she apparently had made friends with the big cat, it suddenly struck out with its paw at a bright beaded moccasin she was wearing. "I knew then I might be in for trouble," she said later, "so later I went over to talk with the trainer and asked, him what to do. The lion was lying quietly on the floor of the stage, and the trainer suggested I stick my foot out again where he could see it.

At this he started to whisk his tail back and forth. The trainer told me not to be afraid but to put my foot nearer. Almost before I could move, the lion was upon me. The beast got Miss Danko's left leg in his two front paws, the claws sinking deep into the flesh. Then he clamped down with his jaws, starting to chew.

"The pain was Incredible," Miss Danko said. "Each bite was torture I wanted to pass out but I couldn't." Before they could pry Miss Danko and the puma apart, the creature had bitten her 13 times, so deeply that most of the scars, doctors tell her, can never be erased. Miss Danko's specialty in stunts is not animal work but falls. "I have fallen," she said, "into ditches, lakes, pools, through trap doors, from piano tops, over chairs and tables, down laundry chutes and stairs. I have fallen over backwards from a height of 25 feet into 32 inches of water and into a pool fully clothed though I can barely swim.

I've been yanked around On wires, had pies and knives thrown at me, have lain amid flames of gasoline-all for the sake of Art and a pay check. But I still like it and it enables me to support my mother and myself." GOODWIN, another stout-hearted stunt woman, who was a leading lady in Western pictures, went around for a year with three fractured vertebrae after a horse carried her headlong into a tree eight years ago during the making of a Universal serial and she never knew she was hurt. "Twenty-five specialists then told me It was a miracle I could walk and that I'd probably soon not be able to do so. They said I'd be paralyzed. An operation fixed me up and I've been stunting ever since.

I'm a fatalist. Things like that don't bother me." To improve the lot of the stunt woman, the -Junior Screen Actors Guild recently promoted a separate organization among them. Forty-six are enrolled as members, though of this number most are specialists In such things as riding, swimming, diving, animal acts. Only a handful do car skids and crashes and the more dangerous miscellaneous feats ah all-around stunt double must be able to do. Heading this new body Is Miss Frances Miles, who herself has been badly battered up during years of stunting, notably when she jumped from a height during a fire scene in "Dante's Inferno" only to discover too late that the man who was to catch her was not in position.

For all this risk, what does a stunt woman earn? If she Is fully qualified and lucky, say the veterans, she can make anywhere from $2,500 to $4,000 or more a year. A stunt "ticket" gets her a minimum of $35 a day. The price of the stunt itself is usually settled by agreement in advance. Highest reward reported by any of the women for a single feat was that of 'Miss Goodwin, who said she got $50 a take for 15 takes when she fell backwards out of a window doubling for Jean Parker in "Have a Heart." If she had been hurt, like any of her sisters In stunting, she could have collected only workmen's compensation from the State of California, for to Insurance agents as to studio press agents, these daredevils are poison. if, however, stunt women make no fortunes, get no great remain more or less obscure In the shadows cast by the white lights that blaze around their other selves, the stars, they nave one solace.

They know Hollywood cant get along without hem. J. HE blond and I charming Loretta Rush, wife of an assistant director and 15 years a film stunt woman though she is just 30, also got into films a daredevil because of her swimming prowess. The first Job I that tested her mettle was a fifty-foot I dive off a cliff into a stone-quarry pool I on location in north-central California. I Since then she has done innumerable Meats doubling for innumerable stars.

She was in the ill-fated car from which jfMarcella Arnold was thrown to her but she escaped injury. In all jher career she has never been more than bruised. "Afraid? Yes of mice," said Miss Rush, who lives on a small ranch in the San Fernando Valley some miles out of Hollywood. "A mouse jumped out of a Rfeed bag here the other day and scared bie almost to death." Not even the experience in which she saw Miss Arnold go to her death served seriously to shake Miss Rush's nerve. Bbe fateful accident occurred when the Bear, which was to skid around a hairpin sftum in low-lying hills near Pasadena, Unexpectedly overturned, landing wheels ph air.

Miss Rush, fully aware of the peril involved after several rehearsals, had braced herself so that when the car I came to rest she was still inside. Miss Arnold was not. "Miss Arnold was really not a stunt woman," said Miss Rush. "She was an extra girl who took a risk because she i needed the money. When I discovered how inexperienced she was, I urged her I to give up the idea, but she said she just had to have the pay.

Unless the odds are heavily against her, the more I experienced stunt girl will get herself out of a dangerous situation because she I knows what to do in a crisis. Miss I Arnold didn't. It is not only foolhardy I for a girl to take such risks without I preparation, it is also tough on all the rest in the scene. What the other fel-j? low does often determines your own I fate." Biggest thrill this young woman ever I got out of her many brushes with death, she says, came in the making of a I silent picture, "Flowing Gold," when she doubled for Anna Q. Nilsson.

In a tank I at Paramount they were making a flood scene in which houses were to be washed down a stream aflame with the fires of spilled gasoline. The surface of the tank had been sprayed with gas and the' match applied, while Miss Rush clung to the roof of a house in the water. "While the camera turned," she re-I called, "a tractor out of range of the lens pulled the house along in the water so that it would seem to be floating downstream. Suddenly the whole house turned over, pinning me to the side of the tank in the fire on the water. How I close I came to my finish that moment I never realized until I saw the film I screened a day or two later.

Boy, that I gave me a thrill!" I REED, a one time Texan who has been stunting in pictures for seven years, was a former leading woman In Westerns. She is especially well known for her work with horses, but she also does almost every other variety of stunt excepting high dives and airplane feats. Miss Reed came close to drowning while doubling for Mae Clarke in "Breach of Promise" some years ago when she dived into Malibu Lake wearing an old-fashioned dress containing yards of material. The dress wrapped itself around tier head, left her struggling helplessly in the water with the film company clear across the lake. A life guard finally got to her as she was near exhaustion.

In "Wild Boys of the Road" she was supposed to jump from a train just in time to cross in front of another train moving in the opposite direction on the adjacent track. The signal for her jump was badly timed, Miss Reed couldn't get across, so saved her nfe by crouching down between the two trains. pursues the 9irU Th When life seems cn-r.