William S. Hart (continued): Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame ~ Celebrating Lives of Achievement.

Suddenly, at the age of forty-nine, William S. Hart found his true calling. He became a movie cowboy, a movie director, and, in his own mind, the preserver of American history and the national identity. His biographer, Ronald L. Davis, said it best: “Convinced … that the westward movement had shaped the American character, Hart wanted to project images of the vanishing West that would generate ethical attitudes and stimulate a communal identity.”

Despite his fame as an actor of westerner roles in the theater, Bill Hart cut an almost comical figure at Inceville, the studio/camp in the hills where the New York Motion Picture Company made westerns. It was a fantasy world for Bill, who had longed all his adult life for the frontier of his childhood. He dressed up for work every day in garish cowboy outfits and tried to conceal his limited grasp of riding and shooting from the old cowhands and Native Americans who lounged around waiting for their calls.

His first attempts at moviemaking made him “heartsick” with disappointment. He lacked the knowledge of camerawork and movie acting that he needed, and he was not satisfied with the scripts. However, by his third try things began to get better. He outlined the script of The Bargain himself and filmed some scenes on location at the Grand Canyon. His character was Jim Stokes, the first of many “good badmen” Hart would play, men who were transgressors but who reformed through the love of a good woman or otherwise performed noble acts despite their sins. (The Toll Gate, filmed in 1920, presents perhaps the purest example of the good badman, and is classic Hart.) By today’s standards, the heavy makeup, the sentimental dialogue and the eye-rolling and pose-striking are outdated and laughable, but in 1914, the movie was “a bold attempt to inject vitality and truth into the ebbing screen Western.” Critics loved The Bargain, as they loved the other Hart westerns that now came rolling out of Inceville every couple of months. Hart once wrote that there was “nothing on earth as humanly appealing as the American cowboy.”

He began directing himself in the Westerns and soon his long-jawed face and somber gaze became a national icon of what was good about America. In his view, he and his movies had a heavy burden to bear as keepers of a culture, “If motion pictures never did any more than perpetuate some of the things in our American life that are being lost in the dust of time they would be worth their weight in gold.”

Hart moved his sister, Mary Ellen, and his beloved English boxer dog, Mack, to Los Angeles and continued to make movies after the New York Motion Picture Company merged into the Triangle Picture Company. He made fifteen movies for Triangle, although disagreements with Tom Ince over salary foreshadowed financial discord for years to come. In 1917 Hart toured the U.S. promoting his films and Liberty Bonds and discovered that he was a genuine celebrity. By the end of the tour, he signed with Adolph Zukor and Artcraft to make sixteen pictures with a guarantee of $150,000 each, plus a percentage of the profits.

During this busy time he also wrote novels and numerous stories for boys’ magazines, putting forth his views of right living and American manhood. In 1918 and 1919 Hart churned out movies at a furious pace, received fifteen hundred fan letters a week, and enjoyed his status as an American superstar. In 1919 he renewed his contract with Artcraft (later Paramount) for seventy percent of the gross and $250,000 per picture.

But his wave had crested. By 1921 Hart was fifty-seven years old and losing his touch. His movies seemed slower and repetitive and an increasingly sophisticated audience of younger people began to prefer lighter and more entertaining Westerns. The big studio system was coming into being in Hollywood, and with it came the pre-eminence of the sales department over the artist. Paramount executives felt that Bill was out of touch with modern tastes and Singer Jim McKee was the last movie Hart made for Paramount.

Artistically, Hart’s work was a kind of Second Era of Western movies. In the first era, Westerns were little more than stock melodramas filmed on stages by no-name actors in bad wardrobes. In the era following Hart, Westerns became lighter, faster-paced and to some degree star vehicles for attractive and lively personalities like Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson, and even later for singing cowboys like Gene Autry. Hart’s oeuvre, by contrast, was long on moralism, patriotism and the code of the West and was distinguished by his attention to atmosphere. “The ramshackle frontier towns, authentic trappings, and a sense of dirt and desert heat … created a mood of romantic realism comparable to what Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington achieved in paintings,” according to Hart biographer Ronald Davis. Hart’s attitudes towards women, Native Americans and Mexicans were very much of their time, and in his movies it was without doubt the able-bodied white male who made America great, despite his often-avowed respect for native peoples.

Although his career was ending, Hart found himself a wealthy man and he spent lavishly to surround himself, his devoted sister Mary Ellen and numerous beloved horses and dogs with ranchlands, a beautiful house, Western antiques and memorabilia. Prudish, reserved and never especially interested in women, Hart now became engaged to twenty-four-old actress Jane Novak, a beautiful blond divorcee. His overwrought love letters to Jane revealed an open, passionate and possibly somewhat adolescent personality for the first time, but in the end the relationship disintegrated, perhaps because Bill made it clear that his sister Mary Ellen would be an important part of their new household. Within months he proposed by mail to another youthful actress, Winifred Westover, and sent her a diamond wristwatch as an engagement present. They were married in Hollywood on December 7, 1921. Less than six months later she moved out of the house, pregnant and complaining about Mary Ellen. Their son, William S. Hart, Jr., was born on September 6, 1922. The divorce was finally settled in 1927.

Adjusting to a life without movies was painful and depressing for Hart. He jumped at the chance in 1925 to make another movie, this time for United Artists. It was Tumbleweeds, a panoramic story of the Oklahoma land rush in 1889. The movie was well-made. But Bill Hart’s stiff and stoic acting style was out of fashion. John Rosenfeld of the Dallas Morning News wrote that his “staple pose of ‘looking noble’ has lost its savor. He is about as dynamic as the Indian head on the Buffalo nickel.”

Bitter and disillusioned that Tumbleweeds did not open the door to a comeback, Hart retreated to his Horseshoe Ranch in the rugged San Fernando foothills north of Los Angeles to build himself and Mary Ellen a twenty-two room Spanish Colonial villa at the top of a windy hill.

He wrote his autobiography, My Life East and West, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1929. It was true to William Hart in that his frontier experiences were highly romanticized and the emphasis throughout was on action, adventure and moralizing.

In 1938 Hart lost his beloved pinto pony, Fritz, who appeared in many of his movies and was

one of his closest companions in retirement. He saw nothing of his son, and ill health darkened his last days in the great house with Mary Ellen, who died in 1944. He rewrote his will after that, leaving nearly everything to Los Angeles County so that it could be preserved as a public park and museum. He made no provision for his son, claiming that he had been a good provider to the boy during his lifetime. He died at California Lutheran Hospital on June 24, 1946, with Bill, Jr. at his bedside. His son contested the will on several occasions but to no avail. A large and gentle man, Bill, Jr. shunned the Hollywood scene and never followed through on a biography and movie he planned about his famous father’s life.

About an hour north of Los Angeles in Newhall, the ranch and home/museum, including the original ranch house which was often used as a movie location, are open to the public. For information, visit www.hartmuseum.org. For a complete biography, see Davis, Ronald L. William S. Hart: Projecting the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.