"If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!": The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah
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"If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!": The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah
592eBook
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Overview
Written by the film critic and historian David Weddle, this fascinating account does critical justice to an important body of cinema as it spins the tale of David Samuel Peckinpah’s dramatic, overcharged life and the turbulent times through which he moved.
Sam Peckinpah was born into a clan of lumberjacks, cattle ranchers, and frontier lawyers. After a hitch with the Marines, he made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features. In 1955 he began writing scripts for Gunsmoke; in less than a year he was one of the hottest writers in television, with two classic series, The Rifleman and The Westerner, to his credit. From there he went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch.
Peckinpah was both a hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, a filmmaker who defined his era as much as he was shaped by it. Rising to prominence in the social and political upheaval of the late sixties and early seventies, Peckinpah and his generation of directors—Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman—broke with convention and turned the traditional genres of Western, science fiction, war, and detective movies inside out. No other era in Hollywood has matched it for sheer energy, audacity, and originality; no one cut a wider path through that time than Sam Peckinpah.
“Groundbreaking.” —Michael Sragow, The Atlantic
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802190086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 592 |
| Sales rank: | 494,889 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Oh, Another Black Peckinpah!"
In his later years, Sam Peckinpah liked to give interviewers the impression that his childhood was a page right out of a Louis L'Amour western. He expounded on the rigors of growing up on a cattle ranch in central California in the 1930s. He told tales of herding, roping, and branding steer, of riding bucking broncos, of hunting deer and running a trap line in the High Sierras, of crossing streams with names like Coarsegold, where grizzled old prospectors still panned for the elusive yellow powder, of saloons in wild and woolly frontier towns like North Fork, where men knocked back shots of rotgut and still drew six-guns to settle their misunderstandings.
A rough, uncouth, yet fantastically exciting boyhood, he described. But only partially true.
Sam Peckinpah was the son of one of the most prominent attorneys in Fresno, California. He grew up in a sprawling suburban-style ranch house, with twenty-four acres of exquisitely landscaped property for his playground. During the Great Depression, while thousands of dispossessed families camped under trees along roadsides, young Sam lacked for no material possessions. He had his own bedroom, crammed with every toy his heart desired. He attended an exclusive grade school, and when he entered public high school he stood out as "the rich kid" who had his own Model A Ford and wore stylish new clothes while his peers made do with hand-me-downs.
Yet the tall tales he later spun for journalists were not complete fabrications either. The genteel middle-class lifestyle he was born into was only a recent development for the Peckinpahs. Just a generation earlier, Sam's grandfather, Charlie Peckinpah, had crossed the Great Plains with his parents in a covered wagon. The Peckinpahs forded rivers, slogged across deserts and swamps, climbed over treacherous mountain passes, and persevered through confrontations with Indians and bandits.
In the 1870s, Charlie lay claim to a 6,000-foot mountain in the High Sierras, just south of Yosemite, California. He and his brothers set up the Peckinpah Lumber Company in a meadow on top of the peak and by 1885 were hauling more than a million board feet of timber off the mountain each year.
Sam's maternal relatives, the Churches, were equally hardy pioneers. Moses J. Church — Sam's great-uncle — dug the first major irrigation canal in central California. The Fancher Channel carried water from the Kings River in the Sierra foothills to the flatlands sixteen miles south, and transformed a desert into productive farmland. As homesteaders converged on Fresno, cattle barons who wanted to preserve the open range counterattacked with hired guns. They tried to shoot Moses Church three times, but in each instance he successfully evaded his assailants.
The assassination attempts didn't much bother Moses; he knew they were the death throes of dinosaurs. The cattle barons were as doomed as the Mono Indians who'd occupied the land before them. Moses had discovered a weapon infinitely more powerful than the six-gun or Winchester: water. He brought it to where it wasn't. By the 1880s more than a thousand miles of canals had transformed the valley into wheat fields, groves of fig, peach, and walnut trees, and vineyards. Moses had fathered the greatest irrigation system in the world.
Sam Peckinpah grew up listening to the many larger-than-life tales of his ancestors. Through them a grand romantic vision of the Wild West unfolded in his imagination — a mythic realm that he longed to be a part of but that time had withdrawn forever out of reach.
His maternal grandfather, Denver Church, lived through the frontier's demise at the turn of the century, but changed with the changing times and flourished. In his youth he had been a hunter and trapper, a cattleman and part-time prospector, but in 1895 he put himself through law school and joined the burgeoning ranks of the professional class. He became a district attorney, a Superior Court judge, and finally a United States Congressman for a district that included Fresno County.
Yet Denver recalled with longing and regret the days of his youth, when a man could gaze from a mountaintop out at the great rolling expanse of a continent still untethered by fences and telegraph wires. So he bought a cattle ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, barely beyond the shadow of Peckinpah Mountain. Forty-one hundred acres of rolling grassland — the old Dunlap Ranch, everyone called it, and the name would stick. It became Denver's retreat, his escape hatch from the twentieth century, a dusty time capsule where the past almost seemed to live and breathe again. He stayed there for weeks and months at a time between stints in Washington — hunting, trapping, and tending to a couple hundred head of cattle.
Sam Peckinpah also stayed there, almost every summer of his youth and on many weekends. His grandfather, father, and older brother taught him to hunt, ride, and herd cattle. He got the chance to live out his fantasies, to have a taste of the long-lost world that the older men talked about. And there he discovered the cruel realities that hid behind the romantic mythology. His ancestors had been brutal men. They had to be to carve out a place for themselves in a wilderness. If one of his boys did something that Charlie Peckinpah disapproved of, he thought nothing of knocking him to the ground with the back of his hand. If a dog stuck his wet nose in Denver Church's face while he was otherwise occupied, he taught the animal a lesson by sticking a lighted cigarette on its snout. "That'll learn him."
The disparity between the romantic myth and the reality of the Wild West provoked complex reactions in the young Sam Peckinpah. His deeply conflicted feelings toward both would later give his westerns an incredible emotional charge.
Sam's mother, Fern, was born to Denver and Louise Church in 1893. She grew into a full-figured girl with her mother's round face and long thick auburn hair. The congressman's daughter had many eager suitors, and her teenage years were a whirlwind of dinners, dances, and picnics. She filled her diary with lengthy descriptions of the clothes she wore to these events and assessments of her various male admirers.
But behind the gay façade she was, from the beginning, a troubled girl. Her mother almost died giving birth to her, and while Louise was recovering Denver nursed his infant daughter with a bottle, changed her diapers, and rocked her to sleep in his arms. An intense bond formed between them. Through all the years that followed, Denver doted and fretted over his precious "Daught." His passionate devotion spoiled the girl. She developed an overwhelming need to be the center of attention at all times, an obsession that would imprison her for her entire life. Denver's image of Fern's fragility became her own; her parents' diaries and early letters contain constant references to Fern's headaches and sick spells.
When Fern was nineteen she fell madly in love with a pharmacist from Long Beach, Bob Nichols. Denver took an instant dislike to the pill-peddling city slicker. Anyone who didn't ride and hunt and love it was weak in Denver's eyes, and Denver hated nothing more than weakness in a man. He treated his own son, Earl, with coolness and at times even open hostility because he thought the boy too timid.
In a long letter to his daughter, Denver tried to dissuade her from marrying Nichols, yet promised he would let Fern make the final decision. "I have always been opposed to parents trying to choose companions for their children — am of the opinion the less they do about it the better."
But he lied. According to Fern's surviving children, her father went behind her back and either paid the young suitor off or threatened him, or most likely both. Whatever the method, Bob Nichols, the love of Fern's life, suddenly vanished one day, never to return. After the initial shock wore off, Fern tried to put on a happy face and proclaim to everyone that it had all worked out for the best, that maybe she and Bob weren't meant for each other after all. But forty-five years later she admitted her real feelings in her diary: "I loved my Dad dearly. We had a wonderful closeness and understanding. Then he double-crossed me about Bob, which I never got over. I never got over the hurt of Dad going back on me and the loss of my sweetheart besides. I wrote and told him I forgave him, but the hurt was always deep inside. ... Dad broke Bob and me up — he completely dominated me, so I have never felt I could win an argument or fight. I just get heartbroken and revert to tears and teenage bewilderment."
Two years later she married David Peckinpah, who at the time drove a stagecoach between the towns of North Fork and South Fork, which were halfway between Peckinpah Mountain and Dunlap's Ranch. The middle of Charlie Peckinpah's three sons, David was quieter and more introspective than his brothers but warm and supportive to family and friends. With his gangly six-foot-one frame, open smile, dark Irish features, and Victorian sense of ethics, David reminded many of the youthful Abraham Lincoln — his greatest hero.
Denver Church took an instant liking to his new son-in-law. "Physically that boy is well nigh a perfect specimen of young manhood," he wrote in a letter to his wife.
It didn't take Denver Church long to convince his new son-in-law to follow in his footsteps and pursue a career in law. The American Dream had changed with the coming of the new century. The frontier to be conquered was no longer without, but within. If a man could set fire to his ambition and pursue his goals with unshakable resolve there were no limits to what he might achieve, nothing to stop him from climbing to the very top of those skyscrapers that now reached up toward the heavens in cities all across the land. Nothing to stop a lumberjack's son, if he applied himself diligently, from winning a seat in the United States Congress — or even, someday, the White House.
When Denver left for Washington, D.C. in November of 1916 to begin his third congressional term, David, Fern, and their new-born son Denny followed. David attended law school at National University and supported himself by working as a doorkeeper at the House of Representatives.
On January 29, 1917, Denver Church announced he would retire at the end of his third term. David graduated from law school in 1919, passed the bar exam shortly afterward, and joined Denver's law firm in Fresno. But Denver didn't last long in private practice; politics was in his blood whether he liked it or not, and soon he was off to run again for assistant district attorney. David teamed up with another lawyer, Raymond Carter. By the mid-1920s he had a thriving practice as a civil and criminal defense attorney.
But by that time he had discovered that behind his wife's brightly animated affectations stirred dark and troubling waters. She was fiercely jealous of any threat to her position in the spotlight, and the biggest threat was David's mother, Isabelle, whom Fern saw as secretly plotting the destruction of their marriage.
"We went over to the Peckinpahs' last night," Fern wrote in her diary. "Mrs. P came out to meet us. She kissed P. D., then me, and last and longest, Dave. She and Dave always act as though they were acting on stage and had to make an everlasting impression. Well, it surely does on me every time I see them. If he was just a boy it wouldn't look so funny, or if she were a poor little old lady. But she is so big and healthy looking and seems like she was just trying to make skinny Dave hollow. She wraps her arms around him so tight and gives me a look that always says 'Miss Church — See? He is all mine and you certainly belong in the background' etc."
Soon they weren't going to visit David's parents anymore, nor any of his brothers. When his brothers came to visit David, Fern would rub her head, claim she wasn't feeling well, and disappear into her bedroom. To avoid conflicts David began seeing his mother on the sly, as if visiting a mistress — either during lunch, or by leaving the office early so Fern wouldn't know about it. His brothers fell into the habit of telephoning him at his office instead of at home and visiting him there too. David's mother was almost never mentioned in his own house. The skeleton was stuffed in the closet along with Denver's betrayal of Fern, and everyone assumed the best possible face and carried on.
There were other disquieting tensions, like Fern's reluctance to act as a full-time mother to their son Denny. That she loved the boy there can be no doubt. Her diary entries and letters from his first few years gush with descriptions of Fern's little darling. But in the baby's less endearing moments, when he cried or threw a tantrum, Fern would abandon him to David or her mother and retire to her bedroom, claiming to feel ill.
"My mother loved babies," Fern Lea Peckinpah, her adopted daughter, recalls. "But she treated them like they were dolls. When they fussed, she couldn't take it."
The task of raising the boy was left almost entirely to Louise and Denver. Denny stayed at his grandparents' ranch for long stretches at a time. He was even left once at the home of one of the ranch hands, Carl Bushman, for a couple of months. "Bushman had married a Mono Indian," Denny himself recalls. "By the time they picked me up I was speaking Mono."
Louise Church was not oblivious to her daughter's difficulty in adjusting to married life. Though Louise had been raised in the Episcopal Church, she converted to Christian Science in the 1920s and convinced David and Fern to join the faith as well. Louise and David hoped Christian Science would help Fern overcome her many "illnesses." She responded with great zeal, and the pages of her diaries are filled with purple praise for the Lord and his teachings. But the new faith only served to fix Fern, like fly in amber, as a helpless little girl dependent on her Almighty Father in Heaven for salvation. Deep below her cheerful facade, rage rumbled.
More than eight years passed between Denny's birth and Fern's second pregnancy. By 1924 her longing for a little girl overcame her dread of childbearing. Morning sickness struck in the spring of that year, and she stayed in bed almost the entire nine months, too overcome with nausea and back pains to rise. Lying in the damp sheets, she kept her spirits up by dreaming of the little girl who soon would be hers to hold, praying for her Heavenly Father to deliver that one gift to her, a little girl she could treasure as her father had treasured her.
Fern went into a difficult labor on February 21, 1925. She was exhausted, breathing shallowly, only dimly aware of her surroundings, when the nurse opened the door and came forward with the wrapped bundle. When she saw the light-olive skin and brown hair, the mark of the dark Irish all over him, she exclaimed, "Oh, another black Peckinpah!"
But when the nurse forced the child into Fern's arms she saw something was different about this one, very different. The eyes. Big and bright as Hudson headlights. They seemed to stare at her with a strange knowingness, feminine yet strong. They triggered in her an outpouring of love that she had never known before.
A picture of Fern with her second son, David Samuel Peckinpah, taken a year later shows her in a big floppy white hat and lace blouse, her face fuller, her hair longer. Grinning from the cradle of her arms is a face almost as round as hers, with huge luminescent eyes and fuzzy brown hair. On the back is an inscription in Fern's handwriting: "Our dear baby is one year old today! My, oh my, what a wonderful thing it has been to have our darling a whole year. It seems such a tiny while ago since they brought him to me all wrapped up in a pink blanket and his little rose bud mouth. If I had known how much happiness the little chap was going to bring me, I couldn't have found one tear for my baby girl that I wanted so very, very much."
In 1931 Fern adopted the little girl she'd prayed for — she couldn't stand the stress of another pregnancy — and named the blue-eyed blonde Fern Lea. But her precious "D. Sammy," as she liked to call him, remained her favorite. The attachment between them was profound. They bathed together until he reached the age of four. When Fern put a stop to the practice the boy rebelled by stealing some jewelry from her bedroom and burying it in the garden. It took them weeks to find it.
"He has the most beautiful eyes a child ever had," Fern wrote in her diary in 1932, when D. Sammy was seven years old. "They are never the same color — sometimes a deep blue-green or green-blue and sometimes they are nearly soft brown. ... He is love itself just bubbling over and so much understanding and sympathy. The tears roll from those big eyes over anyone's troubles. ... I sometimes don't feel worthy of being the little fellow's mommie. I want so much to do the very best thing for him always. I love him better than life itself. God gave me a treasure to have and to hold."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from ""If They Move ... Kill 'Em!""
by .
Copyright © 1994 David Weddle.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue,
1 "Oh, Another Black Peckinpah!",
2 The Prodigious Interloper,
3 "You Can't Kill a Memory That Way",
4 The Bastard Son of John Ford,
5 Moby-Dick on Horseback,
6 On the Beach,
7 The Wild Bunch,
8 "Images They Can't Forget",
9 Caught in the Spotlight,
10 Into the Abyss,
11 "It Ain't Like It Used to Be, But . . . It'll Do",
Notes,