“I don’t think a man is under the influence of liquor until he has to hold on to the grass to keep from falling down.”
Tom Mix was the first superstar of movie Westerns. The archetypal screen cowboy, he made over three hundred silent films that showcased his rodeo skills. Wisely declining to smoke or drink on camera, he became an idol to a generation of kids playing Cowboys and Indians, and his aura of authenticity—he was an honorary Texas Ranger and a pallbearer at Wyatt Earp’s funeral—made him unassailable as any studio’s first choice. Mix lost most of his multimillion-dollar fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. He worked into the sound era, but as injuries and age mounted, younger and brighter stars soon dimmed his own. Undaunted, he continued as a headline attraction at rodeos and circuses until his strange death in 1940.
CHANGE A FEW DETAILS, and it could’ve been a Tom Mix movie. The old cowboy, pushing sixty, rides into Tucson early one morning. He’s been left for dead multiple times—including by one of his big-city wives after she shot him five times—and he’s had a rough couple of years, but he is still the fastest draw in the land, and he has started a campaign to remind everybody.
Which is to say that, on the eve of his 1941 comeback rodeo tour of South America, Tom Mix arrived in Tucson, checked into the old Saint Rita Hotel, and went looking for Ed Echols.
Echols and Mix had been five-star hell-raisers at the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. Now Echols was Pima County sheriff, and Mix was a Hollywood superstar. (In the movie version, one of them would clearly have to be shot by the other upon learning this outcome, though it’s hard to predict which guy would take the bullet.)
Mix and Echols headed over to the home of writer Walt Coburn for an afternoon of rolled cigarettes and whiskey. Mix biographer Richard Jensen later tracked down Coburn for an account of the day: The three old friends talked about the 101 Ranch, the Calgary Stampede, and the Alaska Yukon Pacific. Tom hated all his wives (including, apparently, the one he was currently married to) and couldn’t stop ringing the hundred-year-old mission bell on Walt’s front porch, listening until the ring faded full away. “If you ever take a notion to sell that old bell,” Mix told Walt, “I’d like to have it.”
Mix stayed too long, drank too much, and slept too late the next morning. Sometime around noon, he pulled onto Highway 79 toward Phoenix in his convertible roadster, a luxury car that did nothing to stain his bona fides as a cowboy. Such was his reputation, even still.
The events that followed are a matter of some conjecture. This can occur when the investigating sheriff has a nuanced view of what may or may not be relevant, as Ed Echols surely did. There was talk that Mix had stopped off at the Oracle Junction Inn for a few hands of cards and some whiskey, but nobody came forward to confirm it. Regardless, it’s a known fact that, a few hours later, two highway workers witnessed Mix drive around a corner of Highway 79 doing about ninety and, missing a detour, roll his roadster twice, which killed him instantly.
A theory has since emerged that Mix had been carrying a couple of fancy silver suitcases in his backseat, and when he hit the brakes at the detour, one of them had flown up and hit him in the head so hard it broke his neck and killed him on spot. This so-called “Suitcase of Death” is even on display at the Tom Mix museum in Oklahoma.
Here’s the thing. Those suitcases are not made of silver (that would be too extravagant, even for Mix). They’re made of aluminum. So while the Suitcase of Death is great pulp, Tom Mix probably deserves something a little more simple, like the poetry of the Westerns that he inspired: He died riding too hard.
AT SEVEN STORIES, the Hollywood Athletic Club was the tallest building in greater Los Angeles when it opened in 1924. Designed by Meyer and Holler, the architectural firm behind Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian theaters, the 120-room hotel and spa contained an indoor pool, steam rooms, a barbershop, and a gym; it also doubled as a private, all-male health club boasting a thousand-plus members, a good many of them quite prominent in the film business. In addition to sweating off a hangover, members could avail themselves of one of the rooms upstairs, the perfect hideaway for a man on a bender or a husband on the outs. Over time, management put a bar in one of the rooms and the Hollywood Atheltic Club shifted even further away from exercise, unless you count twelve-ounce curls. It became such a social hub, in fact, that in the mid-1930s, John Ford, John Wayne, Johnny Weissmuller, and a dozen or so other members (presumably some who were not named John) formed their own club within the club: The Young Men’s Purity Total Abstinence and Snooker Pool Association.
At the time, show business people were barred from the city’s more upscale country clubs, and so the members enjoyed poking fun at such snobbery. They held ad hoc meetings that alternated between the steam room and the lounge upstairs. Ford always took minutes, later preserved by his son, and thus surviving as the only copy of the original TYMPTASPA charter.
GOAL: “To promulgate the cause of alcoholism.”
SLOGAN: “Jews but no dues.”
CLUB PRESIDENT: Buck Buchanan, the “distinguished Afro-American” steam-room monitor.
MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENT: proof of status as a “career-oriented drunkard, or at least a gutter-oriented one.”
NOT A MEMBERSHIP REQUIREMENT BUT HELPFUL: fondness for steam rooms.
At subsequent meetings, members were quick to note that these qualifications alone hardly guaranteed membership. Frequent applications by one Dudley Nichols, screenwriter, provided a nice case study. Nichols had two major strikes against him, as voters saw it. For one, he did not drink with total and complete abandon, bearing an unfortunate tendency to fall on the wagon. And second, his politics were “socially reprehensible,” since he believed in justice, fairness, and other radical left-wing fantasies.
Despite his shortcomings, Nichols ultimately became a member in 1937 at the expense of another member: character actor Ward Bond, a TYMPTASPA founder who was “summarily dropped from our rolls for conduct and behavior which is unpleasant to put in print,” Ford wrote in the minutes. “Mr. Nichols’s first action on becoming a member was a motion changing the name of the association to The Young Workers of the World’s Anti-Chauvinistic Total Abstinence League for the Promulgation of Propaganda Contra Fascism. This motion was defeated.”
Several months earlier, the group actually had approved a name change: The Young Men’s Purity Total Abstinence and Yachting Association. When this was later shortened to the Emerald Bay Yacht Club, the group’s primary mission became wearing seafaring blazers with far too many insignias sewn on them. At their first annual St. Patrick’s Day dinner, the group ventured to conduct its business in public, choosing as its venue the Cocoanut Grove. The meeting ended prematurely when a food fight led to their expulsion. Ford wrote a letter to Cocoanut Grove management the following day. “I neither understand nor condone our behavior at the recent fête,” Ford wrote. “Unfortunately, I am not in a position to remember it.”
