Leo Noomis — The Photoplay Has Its Heroes (1922) 🇺🇸

The two pink plaster bungalows faced each other across the tiny strip of flowered court. On one infinitesimal porch, the plump, dark woman kissed her husband goodby and waved him a cheery, prosaic hand as he ambled toward the street car.

by Adela Rogers St. Johns

On the other, a slim, pretty young thing with a baby in her arms stood silent, motionless, watching the little coupe until it disappeared within the green arch of pepper trees.

Then the girl mother went to the window and stood looking down the street — looking — and through the pale chiffon of her waist you could see the terrified beating of her heart.

The plump woman’s husband ambled home, hungry.

A tear trickled down the girl’s cheek. Darkness gathered, shutting her in.

And when a big, dirty studio car swung up the little street and a strange man got out — she trembled so that she could hardly open the door.

On a white roadbed, glaring in the afternoon sunshine, spangled blackly with shadows from the big trees, a flashy roadster stood still just beyond a curve, a gorgeously gowned woman at the wheel.

A young man, rather stocky, good-looking except for a battered nose, was testing a motorcycle. His face was calm, but his eyes held a light of intense concentration.

To the man beside him he said, “I’ll hit it going forty-five, because I’ve got to get speed enough for it to throw me its full length and the width of the car, so I’ll fall clear. It’s going to be an easy one — unless I get tangled. I won’t, of course. But if — I should, Mr. deMille [Cecil B. DeMille], would you sort of keep an eye on the wife and kid?”

The impressive man in puttees said briefly, “I’ll take care of them as long as they live. So don’t worry about that.”

The giant motorcycle hummed. The quiet of the countryside was shattered by that horrible shock of tearing metal, of crashing steel. A body vaulted into the air, flung as a child flings a rag doll, and lay very still on the other side of the car. Leo Noomis [Leo Nomis] had finished his day’s work. You will see ten or twenty feet of it in Manslaughter. And an hour later, the man at the door of the little pink plaster bungalow was saying reassuringly, “He’s all right, Mrs. Noomis. Went great. Gosh, he was right. We wanted him to take it fifteen miles an hour, and he’d been killed sure. Had to get more speed. Only got a broken collar bone. He’s having it set.”

That is the life of a stunt man’s wife, behind the silversheet.

For two weeks later little Mrs. Noomis would sit rocking her baby again while Leo drove a touring car across the track in front of a train going 35 miles an hour — and missed it only seven inches.

While he skilled a closed limousine over a 100-foot cliff.

While he leaped from a burning building into a net so far away that as he jumped it looked no bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Or fell backwards off a great wall, in armour.

Or swung from the wing of one aeroplane to another, 1000 feet above ground.

Or worked himself beneath a moving freight train.

“Oh, well,” she said, with that little smile, “we’re fatalists. Leo has always done it. You get into a thing, there’s good money — it’s hard to change. Leo says — when his time comes, he’d get it just the same if he was riding a street car back and forth to a gas office. Sometimes — since baby came — it’s only that a boy does need his daddy, doesn’t he?”

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The stunt man, Leo Noomis, his wife and his baby boy, Leo, Jr.

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, December 1922