Texas Guinan — Guinan of the Guns (1919) 🇺🇸

Texas Guinan — Guinan of the Guns (1919) | www.vintoz.com

March 17, 2025

She has flourished from Coast to Coast, but, having cut her teeth on a six-shooter, has quite naturally reverted to type.

by Adela Rogers St. John

“For east is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” sang Mr. Kipling [Rudyard Kipling] in one of his most inspirational moments.

But Mr. Kipling didn’t know the movies, the Winter Garden — and Texas Guinan.

Exceptions prove the rule, the sage hath said. Then this story of the beautiful cactus flower who became a Broadway orchid and then, at the call of the camera, abandoned the upholstered chairs of New York’s prize restaurants for the pommeled saddle, demonstrates that at times and under circumstances, east and west get along very nicely.

Like all good stories, ours begins with once upon a time there was a little girl — and her name was Texas, last half Guinan. (The i is just to make it more difficult. Its pronounced just exactly as it should be, with the i like y.)

She was born, as you may surmise from her name, down in the good old trouble state and she cut her teeth on a pearl-handled six-shooter. sat on a horse before she could sit in a chair, and bore a distinct resemblance to her beloved uncle, Senator Joe Bailey of Texas.

But the east claimed Texas. She took off her riding pants, donned a pair of white silk tights and went — to Broadway.

Everybody in Manhattan knew Texas. You’d have thought the states adjoined. She had a house on West Eighth Street full of marvelous antique furniture, an office at the Claridge and a place of business at some good theater.

When she made a trip out to California to do pictures for Triangle two years ago, they cast her for smart young Wall Street widows and bright light vamps and million dollar breach of promise suit heroines. But she happened in the shuffle to get cast for the star role in the “Gun Woman” and then people began to remember her first name.

I found her standing on top of a large California hill, with a gun in each hand and a hard look in her luminous pansy eyes. (I have often scoffed loudly and hilariously at this pet expression of lady novelists. I apologize. In fact, I’ll go them one better — orchid eyes.) Both guns and eyes — the latter far more deadly — were trained on her director, Cliff Smith [Clifford Smith], as able a western director as there is in the moving picture field.

“I won’t let anybody double for me,” said Miss Guinan of Texas in uncompromising tones.

“Then that horse is plumb apt to break your neck, ma’am,” said Mr. Smith politely.

“If any horse that has only four legs can break my neck,” remarked the lady, “it’s time it was broke.”

We sat down on the side of the hill, with vast stretches of California’s rolling foothills and valleys undulating into a sheen of distant sea before us. About half a mile to the right. Mr. Smith, megaphone in hand, was now putting a bunch of cowboys through some hard riding stunts.

“That horse of mine,” said Texas, indicating the lean, wise looking pinto that stood with his bridle over his head, “carried Bill Hart [William S. Hart] through his first pictures. Cliff has got an idea he’s mean but I say old age has gentled him a bit by now. He’s a peach of a stunt horse, though.”

“Well, how do you like it?” I asked.

Texas grinned. “Well, outside of a couple of stitches in my right eye, a cracked nose, a game leg and a — a blister where I hit the saddle, I’m getting along nicely.”

I looked at the newly sewed cut across her eyelid. “How in the world did you get that?”

“Fool horse bolted out of a door with me,”‘ she said. “The edge of the door tried to stop me, but it didn’t have much luck.

“When I came out here the most daring thing I’d done in a couple of years was to order a meal without looking at the right hand side of the menu. Now they ask me to jump a 15-foot ditch as an appetizer before breakfast. I get up about in time to meet myself coming home from the theater. “Why, I was so used to electricity that sunlight hurt my eyes. I didn’t realize they used it for anything except poetry. I’d forgotten a horse was a modern animal and not some extinct antediluvian, though as a kid mama had to drag me down from on top of one to put me to bed.

“I didn’t have any trouble putting on pants. After what I’ve worked in sometimes I felt sort of overdressed at first. But now, no more skirts for me. ‘I have just bought ten suits with pants instead of skirts and from now on I’m going to be so western that Bill Hart will look like he came from Boston.

“They’ve got a horse, a dog. a cat and a whole family of very young cats out at the studio, all named Texas. Every time Cliff yells for me to do a scene, the menagerie walks out. Oh, we’re pretty well represented.

“You see, riding and shooting and roping for the camera is so different from doing it for fun or as a business. There is nothing so unostentatious as true westernism. Its secret is concealment, its essence is smoothness, ease. A real cowboy would as soon be caught stealing eggs as getting his gun into action. They hate display or any show off, worse than anything in the world. It is learning to do things without effort that marks the real westerner.

“And yet, to portray these things for the screen, you’ve got to combine that ease with sufficient action to get it over — to register it. It’s about as delicate an operation as setting a bee’s ankle.

“It’s much more thrilling than riding on the range, because you have to go through with everything. All cowboys will tell you that the fact of the camera’s all-seeing eye will make them nervous at first and will create a case of what is really camera-fright.

“I lost the first jap cook I got because he happened to come in when I was practicing drawing both guns at once. Guess he’s running yet. Hold-ups in New York are mostly done without guns, but the next time I walk into a cafe and want real service, I’m going to take both mine along.

“I’ve got a great big house out in the Hollywood foothills. Why, we’ve got a whole yard full of chickens — don’t get excited, Broadway friends. These have feathers — not in their hats, either. I’m in strict training again, and I’ve lost ten pounds. I started shooting at a beer bottle — what? — oh, I found it out in the alley. I put a cork in it and stuck a match in the cork. First I could miss the bottle. Now I can miss the match. Really. I got that match nine times out of ten the other day.”

Texas Guinan — Guinan of the Guns (1919) | www.vintoz.com

Sometimes Miss Guinan throws her guns in the drawer and goes off for an afternoon at the links. She’s just as handy with the golf-sticks as she is with a six-shooter, though, the caddies say. not so deadly.

Texas Guinan — Guinan of the Guns (1919) | www.vintoz.com

William Sherrill [William L. Sherrill], her manager, tried to do some of Texas’ camera stunts — and look at his arm. Cliff Smith and the gun-lady are grinning because the script calls for an extra notch in Miss Guinan’s gun and there is no room for any more.

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, August 1919

Texas Guinan (1919) | www.vintoz.com

A Gunwoman’s Fowl Work

Texas Guinan’s back yard, in the gelatine village of Hollywood, is one of the few lurking places of that primitive civilization in which chickens actually ate corn. Nowadays even country birds demand a relish, a soup, a fish, an entree, a salad and some perfectly grand anti-fattening dessert. However, these chickens are probably giving a special camera performance. Doubtless they eat their regular meals at the Alexandria, just like their Sennett sisters [Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties].

Photograph by: Stagg

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1919

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