A number of Western films had come through Santa Fe’s Paris Theater while Siringo lived there—Hell’s Hinges, in which an entire town burned spectacularly down, sparked by a saloon gunfight involving a vengeful William S. Hart; breezier stuff, like the Tom Mix feature Six Cylinder Love; or another tough Hart picture, Wolves of the Rail, in which Mexican bandits attacked a moving train guarded by their conflicted former comrade. Such entertainments might be more romantic than life, but the riding and landscapes were a wonder even to a Westerner living among the desert mountains.
Real cowboying was no longer possible, so he’d headed toward the make-believe kind.
Other grizzled frontiersmen—from Emmett Dalton to Bill Tilghman and Wyatt Earp—had gone ahead of him to peddle their experiences to the movies. He came alone but was part of a migration of cowboys seeking movie work, some just for the winter but many cut loose from ranches collapsing around the West. In their chaps and hats and spurs, one columnist noted, there were “more real cowboys in Los Angeles right now than in any other one spot in the world.” To them, all work was honorable that wasn’t on foot, and motion pictures offered a remaining hope of staying in the saddle.
Even as it quieted, the frontier was reenacted and revised, first in Wild West shows and rodeos and now in moving pictures, with the able help of its last working witnesses.
People reinvented themselves all over the West, in Siringo’s case dozens of times. But unlike others hoping to sell their more fabled stories, since his thirties he had often kept stealthy and anonymous, adventuring under a series of personas not his own as a cowboy detective—C. Leon Allison, Leon Carrier, Charles T. LeRoy. He might have seen more of the West than most and met every bad man, lawman, outlaw woman, or cattle king worth knowing, but often not as himself.
He was known mostly as the man who had published the first cowboy autobiography, A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony; as well as a detecting memoir that enraged the Pinkertons, A Cowboy Detective; and a short life of Billy the Kid, whom he had briefly known. Now he would become another retired cowboy in Los Angeles, a slight old Texan without a horse, fingers bent from the ranch work he no longer performed, selling his self-published books out of a satchel. One thing he retained was his silver-plated, pearl-gripped “old Colt’s 45,” which he would bring out for visitors on the least excuse.
By the time Siringo came to town in 1923, an enormous lighted sign was going up in sixty-foot letters spelling the name of a growing real estate development across the brushy hillsides, Hollywoodland. The last time he had been in Los Angeles was the 1890s, before the first filmmakers visited California in 1906 and well before a young theatrical director, Cecil B. DeMille, arrived with a crew, rented a former livery barn at Vine Street and Selma Avenue, and made Hollywood’s first three-reel feature, a melodrama of the West called The Squaw Man, in 1914.
DeMille had been pleased to find skilled cowboy riders drinking and playing cards at a place called the Water Hole, a simple gray frame building on Cahuenga between Sunset and
Hollywood Boulevards, just blocks from his rented barn. (A number of these horsemen would ride as medieval Frenchmen in his Joan of Arc picture.) The Water Hole was more a café than an honest saloon but retained a brass rail and bar; cowboy patrons sneaked their whiskey and tequila from coffee cups. When a stranger entered, recalled the stuntman Jack Montgomery, everyone turned to determine if the newcomer was “Prohibition or free choice.”
As Siringo would discover, any cowboy arriving in Los Angeles was directed to take the streetcar out to the Water Hole to find old friends and learn the news. Some paid an extra nickel to bring their favorite saddle beside them on the trip. Of the Water Hole crowd, the movie gossip Louella Parsons reported, “These heroes of the horse operas are clannish. They talk their own lingo and let the rest of the world go hang. Always, any day you can see dozens of them in a small restaurant near Hollywood Boulevard, where they congregate to swap yarns and discuss their latest ‘operas.’”
Movie people needing cowboys knew to seek them out at the Water Hole, and in those early days before the Central Casting office, they also hired riders out of the Los Angeles stockyards at a day rate. Lucky ones might be picked up and shuttled to the enormous ranch at Universal City, stunt riding for one of the studio’s many Westerns for five dollars a day plus a boxed lunch, far better than they had made as real cowboys.
Among Charlie’s earliest friends in the city was George “Jack” Cole, a cowboy artist and son of Senator Cornelius Cole, whose Colegrove acreage became a part of Hollywood. When the younger Cole heard about Siringo pitiably moving from one lodging to another, he helped find him a place near a building his family owned. The man who managed the apartment house for the Coles lived next door, where he built a one-room cabin for Siringo in his backyard, at 6057 Eleanor Avenue. Charlie moved in, posting a sign above the door, “Siringo’s Den,” and turned the inside walls into what he called a “Rogue’s Gallery” of tintypes showing favorite outlaws and lawmen he had known or hunted or people he merely admired, like Bill Hart.
Hart’s long equine face and lanky form were familiar to anyone who went to the movies—tight-lipped and squinting beneath his broad hat, playing long-limbed frontiersmen like “Two Gun” Bill or “Square Deal” Sanderson, bad men like “Blaze” Tracy, or a self-made legend such as Wild Bill Hickok. Although he privately spoke in the Yankee patrician accent of the Broadway stage, Hart cut a charismatic cowboy figure on the silent screen, riding well and throwing a rope with conviction, flaring a match with one hand, or jumping his beloved pinto gelding Fritz through a window. Charlie had sent the screen Westerner an appreciative letter, and Hart’s kind response credited the writer’s old cowboy book as an inspiration, words Siringo would quote on the back of his new business cards.
From his little Hollywood bungalow, Charlie could now stroll over to the Water Hole. The existence of this cowboy haven walking distance from his new cabin made Siringo’s life more bearable away from his desert ranch and horses. Along with his walk to the public library, Charlie made the Water Hole part of his daily routine, a place where he could hold court of an evening. Some of the bar’s younger regulars had higher hats and shinier spurs than the cow folk he remembered, but the Western outfit Charlie wore did not make him an exotic figure. Everyone seeking movie work dressed the part before leaving the house, just as other hopeful extras crowded studio gates each morning gotten up as soldiers or shopkeepers or southern belles.
Set loose in bars like this one, Siringo had charmed his way into all manner of gangs. He could tell his Hollywood drinking friends about everything from trailing longhorn cattle up from Texas as a boy to playing cards with Billy the Kid or about how a blind old phrenologist once laid his hands on young Charlie’s skull, declaring him fit to be only a newspaper editor, rancher, or detective. He had watched the Old West change, first as a Texas trail hand and later as a cowboy detective, had known the cattle trails in their prime, and had seen the creation of the wild cow town.
Grove Press
Atlantic Monthly Press
