“What was he like?” I asked. “Billy the Kid?”
“Well, for a start his name wasn’t Billy the Kid, wasn’t even William Bonney. It was Henry McCarty, and I would say …” The old man paused for breath. A breeze stirred his fine hair and the branches of the pepper tree above him. I thought suddenly of old Duric Lodokian in his Berlin deathbed.
“… I would say he was one of the meanest, shortassed, buck-teethed, foxy little fuckers I’ve ever met.”
With the help of Barry’s reminiscences I rewrote Eddie’s rotten script. Out went the American Robin Hood and in came something more sinister. The way I told it, my Henry McCarty was an evil runt who shot charming William Bonney and stole his name. Sheriff Pat Garrett, immensely tall (six feet four inches, according to Barry), became a moralistic, lugubrious avenging angel. I took plenty of liberties with the story, but the facts were accurate. It was the eighteenth Billy the Kid film, but the first one to portray him as he really had been.
“He wasn’t even left-handed,” Garfield Barry told me. We were examining the only known photograph of the Kid, where he stands with a rifle by his side. “Some fool reversed the picture first time it was used and now everybody thinks he was a left-handed gun,” Barry said, chuckled and coughed.
I looked closely at the photo. “My God. He’s got three-inch heels on his boots,” I said.
“Told you he was a stunted little bastard.”
I think that was one of my most brilliant ideas in the film. Sonny Pyle, an astonishing young actor (whose tragic death in 1944 was a huge loss to the cinema), played the Kid throughout the film in four-inch Cuban heels. It had the most bizarre effect on every posture and movement. Pyle was thin-faced with staring eyes and we gave him a plate of false teeth so we could get the famous jackrabbit smile. Many people have subsequently analyzed his performance without being able to say precisely why it is so mesmerizing. Quite simply, it is the high heels. My Billy the Kid teeters; he has to go upstairs carefully, he jumps down from his horse with uncharacteristic caution. He walks with a curious bent-kneed gait. For the first time since The Divorce I worked with some enthusiasm on a motion picture.
I think this is what Eddie responded to, I had little trouble in convincing him that we had to shoot the film in New Mexico. The budget doubled, then trebled.
“Yes, Johnny,” he said patiently. “I know. Location authenticity. I’ve heard it all before, remember?”
Towards the end of the year I flew down to Albuquerque to do a location scout. We based ourselves in Roswell and motored out across the Pecos flats searching for small villages that could stand in for nineteenth-century Lincoln and Fort Sumner. For the first time too I became excited about the possibilities of color. Around me were the red and purple mountains, the pink and blue adobe houses, the hay meadows and the rolling alfalfa pastures, the canyon walls stippled with piñon and oak bush. This would be the backdrop for my morality play in which Sheriff Pat Garrett was the hero and the Kid the villain.
I was going to call the film Alias Billy the Kid, but I decided in the end that I would use the name the cowboys gave to their six-guns, The Equalizer.
I am proud of The Equalizer. It doesn’t rank with The Confessions: Part I but it was made — fast — with a kind of angry fervor that allowed me to invest a tired genre with a rare intensity. We filmed in the spring of ’44. Padika was Lincoln; Little Black was Fort Sumner. There was still snow on the Capitan Mountains and I kept them in the background of every exterior shot possible. Cold and remote, they are a continual presence in the film. We filmed also in a fruit ranch near the Ruidoso River. Acres of peach, plum, apple and pear orchards were in bloom. Their blossoms hung like a low-lying pink and white smoke across the landscape. (You will remember that scene when Pat Garrett — Nash McLure — stalks the Kid through the candied pink of the peach orchard.) I used color like a painter: I literally daubed it on. It was my first color film and I had every tone I could heightened. I repainted the adobe houses in Padika. The Kid smoked cigarettes wrapped in bright yellow paper. I ran blue dye down canyon streams. And everything in the landscape had a vernal freshness — the chaparral thickets, the cottonwoods, the bunchgrass and greasewood. The whole film glowed.
Where did this urgency and angry fervor I referred to come from? Why, I hear you ask, was it not present in Gun Justice, Four Guns for Texas and Stampede!? The answer lies in the fact that I ran across Leo Druce a week before I started filming — the encounter acted as a powerful goad.
We met in the Los Angeles Airport departure lounge. I was flying a Transcontinental and Western Sky Chief to El Paso and then flying on up to Albuquerque. Druce was traveling to New York. Both our planes were delayed. Druce was with an elegant woman (his wife?) and two other men. I was alone. It was the first time we had met face to face in six years. He was gray-haired now and stouter. He looked well off. I decided to ignore him and carried on reading my newspaper, but he came over. He was smoking a cigar and I suspect he’d been drinking. He stopped about six feet away from me. I looked up.
“Hello, Todd. Still here?” he said.
I ignored the implied insult. “So are you, I see.”
“Ah, but I’m on my way home. To England.”
“Bon voyage.” I returned to my newspaper. It was full of speculation about a second front.
“Any message for the folks back home?”
“Just go away, Druce,” I said. I am sure it was my indifference that galled him most.
“Been a long time in your funk-hole now.”
I stood up and advanced on him. He stepped back quickly, then recovered himself.
“Listen, Druce,” I said quietly but full of venom, “I don’t need to prove myself to you or anybody. I was three months in that fucking Salient and six months in a prison camp while you were convalescing and totting up figures in the quartermaster’s store. So just go away and leave me alone.”
“The next time you go up in a balloon make sure the wind’s blowing in the right direction.”
“The next time you shoot yourself in the leg, cut the powder burns out of your trousers.”
I swear, until that moment I had never regarded the bullet that had passed through Druce’s leg as anything other than German. The shock in his eyes confirmed the accuracy of my gibe.
He slapped my face.
“You bloody coward!”
I am told that my yell as I leaped on him was quite inhuman. I was hauled off him quickly enough by some TWA officials, but not before my flailing clubbing fists had connected with that self-satisfied, dishonest, craven face. I had shut one of his eyes and split his top lip. I felt a silent howl of atavistic triumph echo through me as I saw his party lead him away to the washrooms groaning, doubled over.
“Madman!” he shouted weakly at me. “You’ll pay for this!”
“Can’t you think of anything more original to say!” I yelled back. I’m delighted to report that the entire departure lounge burst into laughter.
I was in Albuquerque and then Roswell when the story broke in the newspapers and so saw nothing of it. I believe it was all reported with clumsy irony: the “Britishers” fighting each other in L.A. while the real enemy lay overseas. At any rate that, plus the Zanuck incident, was enough to get me branded as a “hellraiser.” For a good while afterwards, people greeting me would recoil with gestures of mock terror and hostesses would whimsically entreat me at parties not to rough up the guests. Never believe anything you read in newspapers.