Richard Talmadge — Could a Broken Neck Stop Him? Not Much! (1927) 🇺🇸

August 02, 2024

Ten thousand persons jammed Olive Street and Pershing Square in the heart of Los Angeles one day about a year ago. On a hotel window ledge, five stories up, a young man was poised, about to leap to the street. The door to his room was locked.

by A. L. Wooldridge

“It’s suicide!” a nervous little woman said. “It will kill him, sure as fate!” replied another. “He will break his neck! Why don’t the police stop him?”

Morbid curiosity held them. If he did break his neck — well, it was his neck. If he killed himself — well, they would see the suicide.

The strange thing about it was that the young man had broken his neck several months before — and had lived. And he was now trying to find out just what effect a broken neck would have on a fellow’s nerve. He had been making leaps into space for years — in fact, had been raised as a gymnast and had been a tumbler in a circus. So he wasn’t afraid of aerial stunts — that is, he hadn’t been, up to the time he had snapped a vertebra at the base of his skull. He wanted now to find out whether that accident would make him afraid. Would his self-assurance desert him?

You see, Richard Talmadge was taking stock. He was studying himself. His heart bravely told him, “You’re all right again. You’re as good as ever.” But from away back in his mind there came the warning, “Be careful, now! That’s how you got hurt.”

Young Talmadge had once plunged seventy-two feet down a mountainside into a pile of sliding sand and had escaped uninjured. He had driven an automobile over a cliff, jumped from the car in mid-air, and landed without a scratch. Then, in making an almost inconsequential leap from the roof of a small building into a motor car, his head had struck the back of a seat and his neck had snapped. Paralysis had threatened and the surgeons had given him up.

I sat in Dick’s office at Universal one day not long ago and heard him describe how he had felt that day as he had poised himself on the window ledge of that hotel. He very frankly admitted that the intended leap of forty-five or fifty feet had seemed more important to him than almost anything he had ever done in pictures.

“It wasn’t that the distance was so great,” he said, “but I wanted to know myself. I had done more dangerous things, but the point was, what would my mind say to me now? Would it stop me? Let me tell you that one of the happiest moments of my life was when I jumped from that window and landed safely on the mattress in the street. I felt a positive exultation in discovering that I was not afraid. Can you realize what that meant to me? It meant that I could go on in pictures. My mind still had confidence in my body.

“Place yourself in my position,” he continued. “How would you feel if you had dived into a passing automobile from the roof of a house and had broken your neck? Wouldn’t you have hesitated about doing such a thing again?

“Self-preservation is the first law of nature, we are told. Then there is the old adage that ‘a burnt dog dreads the fire.’ But my case was a little different from the usual because I had been born in a family of gymnasts and from my earliest days had been taught tumbling and daredevil stunts.

“My father had trained me not to fear anything that we worked out mathematically as being physically possible. It is quavering nerve, doubt, hesitancy, he told me, that causes accidents in stunts.

The fellow who boldly, bravely steps into a situation, confident that he can achieve a thing, usually does achieve it.

“Let me see if I can illustrate what I mean. There are men who can easily make a running jump of fifteen feet. On level ground, with no danger involved, they will do it repeatedly for the fun of the thing. But when called upon to jump only twelve feet over a chasm a thousand feet deep or from the roof of one building to another, they will say, ‘Not on your life. If I slipped, it would kill me!’ Yet they know that they can easily jump three feet farther on level ground and never slip.

“You can stretch a rope from the limb of a tree to a fence and many a man will swing hand-over-hand along it without any fear whatsoever. But put that same rope across an abyss a mile deep and you won’t find one in a thousand who will attempt to cross it. It’s that little old subconscious mind that plays tricks on us from the self-preservation angle. Only when you approach these things with utter confidence, with the feeling, ‘Why, this is simple!’ can you accomplish them.

“A year or two ago I was making a Western thriller in which I was to drive an automobile up a small incline at a high rate of speed and then leap a chasm. The stunt looked simple and I thought I would have a lot of fun doing it. But the runway that had been constructed was faulty and, instead of clearing the gap, the car went into a nose dive and smashed into the opposite wall of the canon. I landed at one side. When the machine had started on its dive I had had enough presence of mind in that bit of a second to jump. I landed in sand, unhurt except for a slightly bruised back. “You see, as I landed, I rolled up in a ball to distribute the force of the fall throughout my body. That is the secret of falling. If you throw an egg into the air and it falls with a thud, it will break. But if it falls where it can go rolling and bouncing along until it loses its momentum, it can stand a lot.

“That seventy-two-foot leap down the side of a mountain that I once did was supposed to be a dangerous feat. But like the egg, I went bounding and bumping along in the sand until I stopped and wasn’t hurt a bit. I got two dollars and fifty cents for that fall. That was a long time ago.

“The subconscious mind has much to do with stunts in the movies. I was asked once to double for George Walsh in a scene in which I swung from a rope through a plate-glass window and landed on the floor inside. It wasn’t a hard thing to do but it looked spectacular. Several young men had undertaken to do it but, when the time had come to let go of the rope and go slamming through the glass, each one in turn had reneged.

“A lot of people have the idea that, as a result of trick photography, there isn’t so much danger nowadays in making thrilling scenes for pictures. The fact of the matter is that there is more danger than ever because the public expect greater realism in the movies than they used to. Young men show up at a studio declaring themselves willing to do any stunt within reason, believing that in some mysterious way they will be safeguarded from possible injury. But when the time comes to do something that really involves a bit of daring, they usually beat a retreat. There is danger in most of the spectacular things you see in the movies.”

He drew forth a sheet of paper and began recounting the various injuries he had sustained in his screen career. The list was amazing. He had broken his neck, broken both ankles, broken both collar bones twice, broken three fingers on his right hand, broken two fingers on his left hand, broken both elbows, broken his right shoulder, chipped away a piece of his left elbow, and broken three ribs on his left side.

He had leaped fifty-three feet from the North Broadway Bridge in Los Angeles to a passing freight train and from the train to the ground. He had run a motor cycle into an automobile truck, catapulting himself over the hood by the force of the collision. With both hands tied behind him, he had leaped over a team of horses and landed on his face. Innumerable times he has jumped from twenty to fifty feet from a building to the ground or has leaped across areaways from fifteen to twenty feet in width.

And yet his broken neck has healed, the broken bones throughout his body have knit, and most important of all he has lost none of his nerve.

In spite of the price he has paid for fame in broken bones, Dick Talmadge fairly bubbles with the joy of life. That is probably one big reason why he has made such a success in his profession.