Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 293: The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars (1969)

Kathy and Ed Wood at Kenne Duncan's wake. Note the book Ed is holding.

Awake, a wake.

There is a sweetly sad quality to the photos of Ed Wood taken in the last decade of his life. Eddie was in freefall by then, physically, personally, and professionally. Years of alcohol abuse had ravaged his face and body, leading to his early death at age 54. His career in show business was faring no better. He was supporting himself entirely through his work in the adult film and publishing industries. And even there, he had to maintain a furious pace just to (almost but not quite) keep up with his creditors. As he spiraled into addiction and poverty, he often took out his frustrations on his wife, Kathy. Ed Wood's last decade was marked by disappointment, uncertainty, violence, and desperation.

And yet, the man in the pictures looks cheerful and content. Not a care in the world, this guy. Sure, you could say that he was simply too soused to worry what was happening to him. He found a fool's paradise at the bottom of a glass and stayed there. But I'd like to think that the optimism that brought him to Hollywood in the 1940s had not abandoned him entirely in the 1970s.

One of the most compelling latter-day photos of Ed Wood was taken at the wake of actor Kenne Duncan in 1972. After years of declining health and declining fortunes, the famed cowboy actor ended his own life by overdosing on barbiturates. Some time later, Eddie and Kathy celebrated his memory by throwing a wake in his honor. They invited such luminaries as Paul Marco, Criswell, David Ward, Nona Carver, and Hope Lugosi. A somewhat grainy, underlit black-and-white photo—complete with handwritten notes by Kathy—captures all of these people, plus figures I believe are Marg Usher (Paul's agent) and actress Mona McKinnon. Eddie, drunk as a lord, is leaning against Kathy and holding a book: Ernest N. Corneau's The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars (1969). 

Naturally, I was curious. What was this strange, obscure book? What secrets might it contain?

Author Ernest N. Corneau.

Luckily, used copies of Corneau's book are neither rare nor expensive. It's not a title I would have come to had it not been connected to Ed Wood. Although I have enjoyed numerous Western films and TV shows—and I even went through a brief Lone Ranger phase in my youth—I cannot say I am a devotee of the Western genre. My late father was a lifelong cowboy movie fan, and sometimes, I wish I'd been able to converse with him more knowledgeably about the topic. A book like The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars might have helped.

After "years of research," Massachusetts-born movie memorabilia collector Ernest Noel Corneau (1927-1978) published Hall of Fame in 1969. Significantly, this was the same year that Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider ushered in the "new Hollywood" while simultaneously evoking the Old West. (Its stoned antiheroes are named Wyatt and Billy, for example, and their customized choppers stand in for horses.) Corneau's aim was simply to preserve the history of a then-dwindling genre he loved but that he felt was grossly under-represented in books about movie history. As he says in the foreword: "For various reasons, the 'sagebrush heroes' have been sadly neglected." This was Ernest's only known published work; he died less than a decade after it was released at the age of 51.

Corneau's book consists of capsule biographies of several hundred prominent Western actors, spanning the entire history of motion pictures up to that point. Generally, these biographies run between one to three pages and include details of the actors' lives and careers—all delivered in the unadorned, plainspoken style we've come to expect from reference works. The only real editorializing that Corneau does is to discuss the popularity and/or quality of the films in very broad terms. Each biography ends with a filmography section, but this is of somewhat limited value because it is formatted as a big block of italicized text and does not contain release years for the individual movies. Occasionally, in addition to entries for individual actors, the author switches things up with sidebar pieces about various specialty topics: sidekicks, horses, villains, cowboy trios, etc.

I can see why a book like this would have been a goldmine to Ed Wood. Once again, we have to cast our minds back to those pre-internet days when entertainment fans were almost entirely reliant on print media for information about the things they loved. I was reminded of my own adolescence, when I'd eagerly look through the movie history books at the library only to find very little coverage of the topics that actually interested me. (If such a book starts with a chapter about D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, it's very unlikely to get around to, say, David Lynch or Herschell Gordon Lewis.)

Duncan: barely a mention.

Still in all, The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars was an odd choice to bring to Kenne Duncan's wake. The sneering, hissable actor is mentioned in the book only once, and it's on page 289 out of 307. He's merely one of literally dozens of actors listed in that aforementioned sidebar about Western villains. Some other actors in the Ed Wood firmament, including I. Stanford Jolley and Lyle Talbot, are mentioned in this same section. Corneau states that Duncan was "proficient in the field of Westerns." That's it.

Meanwhile, longtime Wood crony Johnny Carpenter is relegated to the "Honorable Mentions" section of the book and gets an unflattering one-line listing: "He produced, directed, and starred in his own horse operas during the 1950s, but never reached any important status." Ouch. Actor Frankie Darro, who was in the Wood-scripted The Lawless Rider (1954) appears in this same section, but Corneau calls him "an excellent but under-rated juvenile star." Better.

Perhaps, if Hall of Fame had met with greater success at the bookstalls, Ernest Corneau could have done an entire spinoff volume just about the bad guys. What becomes clear over the course of this tome is that Corneau is trying to tackle an enormously complicated and wide-ranging topic, one even bigger than he realized when he started writing and researching. The author had to set parameters, just to have a hope of completing this project. There simply isn't room for everybody here. In the introduction, he has to justify why some prominent actors, including Walter Brennan and Henry Fonda, are absent. And there's not even a hint of the Italian-made spaghetti Westerns. Not a single mention of Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood. Corneau is writing purely about classic Hollywood-made cowboy pictures, the kind Eddie Wood grew up loving in Poughkeepsie.

Now for the good news! Numerous actors with a direct (or tangential) connection to Ed Wood are given full-length profiles in this book. Ernest Corneau is almost absurdly generous in this respect, I can very much imagine Eddie poring over these pages and savoring each detail he could find about his heroes and friends. I suppose the fact that so many of these folks worked with Ed Wood is evidence of how their careers (or cowboy pictures in general) had declined by the 1950s. Here are just some of the examples I found in The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars:

• 

  Keene: A Western/Woodian star.

  Tom Keene (1896-1963): This is the cowboy star most closely associated with Ed Wood. Born George Duryea and sometimes billed as "Richard Powers," Tom was a prolific and popular B-Western actor long before appearing in Ed Wood's The Sun Was Setting (1951) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Eddie was also involved in numerous unsuccessful attempts to launch a TV show starring Keene. Pilots for The Adventures of the Tucson Kid and Tom Keene, U.S. Marshal still exist and have been reviewed on this blog. U.S. Marshal also features Italian-American actor Frank Yaconelli, who is briefly mentioned in The Hall of Fame under "Sidekicks." Keene gets an especially kind writeup in Hall of Fame, with Corneau complimenting him on the believability and maturity of his characters.

• Buck Jones (1891-1942): An actor Ed Wood idolized all his life, Buck Jones was one of the dominant Western stars of the 1920s and '30s but perished due to injuries sustained in Boston's tragic Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942. Though he and Eddie never worked together (or even met, according to Kathy Wood), Jones is nevertheless a recurring presence throughout Nightmare of Ecstasy, a symbol of unattainable perfection hovering over Ed Wood. Ernest Corneau was clearly a Jones fan, too, complimenting the actor on his loyalty to his fans, his stable family life, and his ability to inject humor into his films without appearing foolish or employing a comic relief sidekick. While Buck Jones is not a name that necessarily resonates with modern audiences, it's clear that this was an actor who, in his prime, influenced an entire generation of moviegoers. Ed Wood and John Wayne both worshipped at the altar of Buck Jones, as did millions of Western fans across America.

• Gene Autry (1907-1998): Naturally, a Western star of Autry's magnitude deserves—and gets—a substantial amount of real estate in The Hall of Fame of Western Movie Stars. According to Corneau, it was Autry who unseated the great Buck Jones as "King of the Cowboys" in the late 1930s. But the reason Texas native Orvon Grover Autry is of interest to Ed Wood fans is his connection to Ed's ill-fated The Ghoul Goes West or The Phantom Ghoul. Gene was supposed to star opposite Bela Lugosi in this horror/Western hybrid, but the legendary singing cowboy backed out of the project, and it was never made. This kerfuffle barely merits a footnote in Autry's story, but it's a memorable chapter in Wood's. I can't be the only Ed Wood fan who learned of this story from Ted Newsom's documentary Ed Wood: Look Back in Angora (1994).

• Tom Tyler (1903-1954): The road that led Tom Tyler (real name: Vincent Markowski) to Ed Wood was a long and winding one. He was, as Corneau puts it, "a professional football player, lumberjack, prizefighter, and sculptor's model before he entered motion pictures." From the 1920s to the 1940s, he worked his way up from stuntman and bit player to star. In addition to his cowboy films, he played the title role in Republic's 1941 serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel and Kharis in Universal's The Mummy's Hand (1940). But then, severe illness sidelined Tyler for several years. His once-thriving career withered away to almost nothing. By the 1950s, he was reduced to playing a deputy in Ed Wood's Crossroad Avenger (1953). Nightmare of Ecstasy contains a colorful anecdote from (who else?) John Andrews, explaining how the up-and-coming Wood met the down-and-going Tyler. Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander may have been  thinking of this story when they wrote Ed and Bela's meet-cute scene in Ed Wood (1994).

• Ken Maynard (1895-1973): Ed Wood's association with cowboy star Ken Maynard—described by Ernest Corneau as one of the "ten greatest cowboy stars of all time" and "one of the most popular of all sagebrush heroes"—lasted decades. When Ken made a personal appearance in Poughkeepsie, NY, you can bet young Eddie was there in the front row. Decades later, when Ed had migrated out to Hollywood, he and his wife Kathy would occasionally visit Ken, who was retired and living in a trailer in the San Fernando Valley. Eddie had considered Ken for The Ghoul Goes West, but as we all know, that film never came to be.

• Yakima Canutt (1895-1986): This badass bronco-buster from Washington gained legendary status as Hollywood's greatest and most daring stuntmen and stunt coordinators. His career in that field spanned 60 action-packed years. But he directed and co-directed some features, too, both theatrical and made-for-television. As it happens, the last theatrical feature film Yakima Canutt ever helmed was The Lawless Rider, which Eddie cowrote with Johnny Carpenter. Yakima's writeup in The Hall of Fame of Western Stars is appropriately awestruck. Corneau calls him "one of the most admired and respected members of the movie industry" who "contributed a large share toward the advancement of the Western." And he worked on an Ed Wood movie, too!

• Bob Steele (1907-1988): And here we have another actor who was a major star in his own time but is almost unknown in ours. As I discussed in an article back in 2021, Eddie had some big plans for the former Robert Adrian Bradbury, a diminutive but sturdy Oregon-born actor whose screen career lasted nearly half a century. Maybe, Ed thought, they could do a TV series together. Or a movie. Maybe Bob could even replace Gene Autry in The Ghoul Goes West. None of this came to pass, unfortunately. So Bob Steele didn't get to take his rightful place among the Wood Spooks, but Ernest Corneau still calls hm a "perennial favorite of Western fans" and says that Steele "truly earned his title of 'The Little Giant of Westerns.'"

• Ray "Crash" Corrigan (1902-1976): Besides his voluminous work in Westerns, Wisconsin actor Ray "Crash" Corrigan (aka Raymond Benitz) had a second career as one of Hollywood's "gorilla men," those fellows who owned their own gorilla costumes and portrayed the beasts in various productions. It was long thought that Corrigan was the man in the monkey suit in The Bride and the Beast (1958), but it could have been his protégée, Steve Calvert, instead. More than a decade later, Corrigan produced Eddie's softcore comedy Take it Out in Trade (1970). Back in 2019, the late Greg Javer wrote a marvelously informative article about Corrigan's stormy life for this blog.

• Bud Osborne (1884-1964): In a career that lasted half a century, Texas-born stuntman and actor Leonard "Bud" Osborne amassed over 600 film and television credits, at least five of which were Ed Wood movies: The Lawless Rider and Crossroad Avenger, plus Jail Bait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Night of the Ghouls (1959). As you might have guessed, Bud was just a little past his prime when he crossed paths with Ed, though he continued doing episodic TV work well into the 1960s. In his heyday, according to Corneau, he was respected for his stagecoach-driving and the special "touch of villainy" he could bring to a production.

I wanted to own The Hall of Fame of Western Film Stars because I was captivated by that low-quality photo of Ed Wood clutching a copy of Corneau's book as if it were a beloved memento. And now, with my own copy in hand, I can understand how Ed felt. I did not grow up in the golden age of cowboy movies or Western TV shows. The last episode of Gunsmoke aired five and a half months before I was even born. But classic Westerns heavily influenced the sci-fi and action movies that I watched as a kid, and cowboy parodies were common in Looney Tunes and The Three Stooges. And there's just no way of understanding Ed Wood without knowing a little of this genre. As Paul Marco stated in Nightmare of Ecstasy:

"[Ed] was a fanatic cowboy movie buff. He'd look at the TV Guide and circle everything. He'd watch Buck Jones at 3 in the morning. The television was never turned off. I don't know when he slept. The lights and the television would be on all night long."

To be honest, I don't think I've ever loved anything as much as Eddie loved Westerns.