Up Till Now: The Autobiography

Bam, broken nose.
    But after about a month El Tranquillo had become crazed by the snap of the clapboard—as soon as he heard it he knew he had to work and he didn’t like it. We stopped using the clapboard, instead the director shouted “Action.” But he quickly caught on to that. And he became difficult to ride. Meanwhile, El Nervisio got used to me and calmed down. So in the middle of the film we had to switch horses; El Tranquillo was used for long shots and El Nervisio was used for close-ups.
    Honestly, I personally would pay a penny for this movie, if just to see the riding. After this I did several other films in which I rode— including one film in which I played perhaps the most celebrated rider in history.
    No, I did not play Lady Godiva.
    In John Jakes’s The Bastard I played Paul Revere, riding through village and town—in the mud as it turned out—to warn Americans. It was a small role in which... wait, let me do it for you. “To. Arms! To arms! The British. Are coming ! The British are coming!” In my entire career, that was the easiest dialogue I ever had to memorize.
    I got to ride quite a bit in the television movie North Beach and Rawhide, which ended with a rodeo. I played Rawhide, an ex-con who runs a correctional ranch for wayward kids, believing that working with horses could have great therapeutic value for them. By the time I did this film I was already involved with the Junior Justice Correction Program, but hadn’t yet discovered Ahead with Horses. In the seventh Star Trek feature film, Star Trek: Generations, I had a scene in which I’m riding with Patrick Stewart. In that film I rode a horse that I’d bred on my horse ranch in central California.
    I can just imagine if my father had lived and was reading that lastsentence: Billy has a horse ranch? My Billy? What does he call it, the Bar Mitzvah?
    Patrick Stewart had very little experience on horseback so I worked with him. I remember the best single bit of advice I ever gave him: Patrick, you should wear pantyhose under your pants because it will reduce the chafing.
    As I’ve learned several times, horseback riding can be dangerous. You don’t ride a horse a lot without falling off. I remember how awful I felt when Chris Reeve broke his neck. I knew Chris vaguely, and several months after his accident I went to visit him. As I walked through the glass doors of the hospital in New Jersey I saw him sitting in his wheelchair, breathing with the assistance of a machine, and I thought, what am I possibly going to say to him? I sat down beside him and within minutes we were talking about horses. Horses on the bit, off the bit, all we talked about was horses. He loved them as much as I did.
    But for months after that visit every time I got on a horse I thought, is this it? Is this the day I fall off a horse and break my neck? I was just luckier than he was. In 1975 we were shooting the first episode of a series that eventually became known as Barbary Coast , although at that point it was called Cash & Cable . The series was a combination of Wild Wild West , Mission: Impossible , I Spy , and just about every other period detective show ever done. I was Cable. The gimmick was that each week I would have to wear some elaborate disguise. For this episode, though, I was dressed as a cowboy. The first day of filming, the very first day, we were doing a simple stunt, a horse falling. I decided to do it myself. I won’t volunteer to do a stunt if it’s unnecessary or dangerous—I’m not going to fall off a building in a long shot in which no one can see my face. But if the camera is going to be close enough for the audience to recognize me, I want to do it.
    Falling off a horse is not a particularly dangerous stunt. To do it, they dig a soft pit to fall into. When you give the horse its cue, yanking his head around, he’s trained to fall flat. The key is to get your legout from under the horse. You do this stunt with your feet out of the stirrups; the ground is soft and as long as you let yourself relax you’ll get away from the horse.
    I had never done a falling horse gag before—but I’d seen it done many times. What could go wrong? “This is where you fall,” the director told me as we worked out the shot. “When you fall, roll into here. The cameras are gonna be right on your face as you roll in, so we’ll get it all in one.” Then he had the crew water down the pit to get rid of the dust and soften it for my fall.