| Tom Mix |
Tom Mix, 1925 |
| Born |
Thomas Hezikiah Mix[1]
January 6, 1880(1880-01-06)
Mix Run, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died |
October 12, 1940(1940-10-12) (aged 60)
Florence, Arizona, U.S. |
| Other names |
Thomas Edwin Mix |
| Occupation |
Actor |
| Years active |
1909–1935 |
| Spouse |
Grace I. Allin (1902–1903)
Kitty Jewel Perinne (1905–1906)
Olive Stokes (1907–1917)
Victoria Forde (1918–1931)
Mabel Hubbard Ward (1932–1940) |
Thomas Edwin "Tom" Mix (born Thomas Hezikiah Mix;[1] January 6, 1880 – October 12, 1940) was an American film actor and the star of many early Western movies. He made a reported 336 films between 1910 and 1935, all but nine of which were silent features. He was Hollywood’s first Western megastar and is noted as having helped define the genre for all cowboy actors who followed.
Early years
Mix was born into a relatively poor logging family in Mix Run, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles (60 km) north of State College, Pennsylvania. He spent his childhood growing up in nearby Dubois, Pennsylvania, learning to ride horses and working on the local farm owned by John Dubois, a lumber businessman. He had dreams of being in the circus and was rumored to have been caught by his parents practicing knife-throwing tricks against a wall, using his sister as an assistant.[citation needed]
In April 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the Army under the name Thomas E. (Edwin) Mix. His unit never went overseas, and Mix later failed to return for duty after an extended furlough when he married Grace I. Allin on July 18, 1902. Mix was listed as AWOL on November 4, 1902, but was never court-martialed nor apparently even discharged. His marriage to Allin was annulled after one year. In 1905, Mix married Kitty Jewel Perinne, but this marriage also ended within a year. He next married Olive Stokes on January 10, 1909, in Medora, North Dakota.
In 1905, Mix rode in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade led by Seth Bullock with a group of 50 horsemen, which included several former Rough Riders. (Years later, Hollywood publicists would muddle this event to imply that Mix had been a Rough Rider himself.)
After working a variety of odd jobs in the Oklahoma Territory, Mix found employment at the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch, reportedly the largest ranching business in the United States and covering 101,000 acres (409 km²), hence its name. He stood out as a skilled horseman and expert shot, winning the 1909 national Riding and Rodeo Championship.[citation needed]
Mix often claimed to have attended the Virginia Military Institute and to have been the son of a cavalry officer.[citation needed] There is no basis for these claims.[citation needed]
Film career
Mix appeared opposite Victoria Forde in many westerns. They were married in 1918.
Selig Polyscope
Mix began his film career as a supporting cast member with the Selig Polyscope Company. His first shoot in 1910 at their studio in the Edendale district of Los Angeles (now known as Echo Park) was Ranch Life in the Great Southwest, in which he showed his skills as a cattle wrangler. The film was a success and Mix became an early motion picture star. Olive gave birth to their daughter Ruth on July 13, 1912. Mix performed in more than 100 films for Selig, many of which were filmed in Las Vegas, New Mexico. While with Selig he co-starred in several films with Victoria Forde, and they fell in love. He divorced Olive Stokes in 1917. By then, Selig Polyscope had encountered severe financial difficulties, and Tom Mix and Victoria Forde both subsequently signed with Fox Film Corporation, which had leased the Edendale studio. Mix and Forde married in 1918 and they had a daughter, Thomasina Mix (Tommie), in 1922.[citation needed]
Tom Mix in
Mr. Logan, U.S.A., c. 1919
Mixville
He went on to make more than 160 escapist matinee cowboy films throughout the 1920s. These featured action oriented scripts which contrasted with the documentary style of his work with Selig. Heroes and villains were sharply defined and a clean-cut cowboy always "saved the day." Millions of American children grew up watching his films on Saturday afternoons. His intelligent and handsome horse Tony also became a celebrity. Mix did his own stunts and was frequently injured.
Mix's salary at Fox reached $7,500 a week. His performances weren't noted for their realism but for screen-friendly action stunts and horseback riding, attention-grabbing cowboy costumes and showmanship. At the Edendale lot Mix built a 12-acre (49,000 m2) shooting set called Mixville. Loaded with western props and furnishings, it has been described as a "complete frontier town, with a dusty street, hitching rails, a saloon, jail, bank, doctor's office, surveyor's office, and the simple frame houses typical of the early Western era." Near the back of the lot an Indian village of lodges was ringed by miniature plaster mountains which on screen were said to be "ferociously convincing." The set also included a simulated desert, large corral and a ranch house with no roof, to facilitate interior shots.
During 1929, Mix's last year in silent pictures, he worked for Film Booking Office of America (FBO), a small movie studio run by Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and soon to be merged into Kennedy's RKO Radio Pictures. Mix was 49 and by most accounts he was ready to retire from the movies. That same year, Mix was a pallbearer at the funeral of Wyatt Earp (during which he reportedly wept).[2]
1930s
Mix appeared with the Sells-Floto Circus in 1929, 1930 and 1931 at a reported weekly salary of $20,000. He and Forde were divorced in 1931. Meanwhile, the Great Depression (along with the actor's free-spending ways and many wives) had reportedly wiped out most of his savings. In 1932, he married his fifth wife, Mabel Hubbard Ward. Universal Pictures approached him that year with an offer to do talkies which included script and cast approval. He did nine pictures for Universal, but because of injuries he received while filming, he was reluctant to continue with any more. Mix then appeared with the Sam B. Dill circus, which he reportedly bought two years later (1935).
Mix's last screen appearance was a 15-episode sound Mascot Pictures serial, The Miracle Rider (1935), receiving $40,000 for four weeks of filming. Also that year, Texas governor James Allred named Mix an honorary Texas Ranger. Mix went back to circus performing, this time with his eldest daughter Ruth, who had appeared in some of his films. In 1938, Mix went to Europe on a promotional trip, while his daughter Ruth stayed behind to manage his circus, which soon failed. He later excluded her from his will. He had reportedly made over $6,000,000 (approaching $400 million in early 21st century, inflation-adjusted values) during his 26-year film career.
Radio
In 1933, Ralston-Purina obtained his permission to produce a Tom Mix radio series called Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters which, but for one year during World War II, was popular throughout most of the 1930s through the early 1950s. Mix never appeared on these broadcasts, and was instead played by radio actors: Artells Dickson (early 1930s), Jack Holden (from 1937), Russell Thorsen (early 1940s) and Joe "Curley" Bradley (from 1944). Others in the supporting cast included George Gobel, Harold Peary and Willard Waterman. The Ralston company offered ads during the Tom Mix radio program for listeners to send in for a series of 12 special Ralston-Tom Mix Comic books available only by writing the Ralston Company by mail.
Death
Tom Mix memorial near the site of his death
On the afternoon of October 12, 1940, Mix was driving his 1937 Cord 812 Phaeton near Florence, Arizona, (between Tucson and Phoenix) on Arizona State Route 79. Mix had been visiting Pima County Sheriff Ed Nichols in Tucson,[3] and had stopped at The Oracle Junction Inn, a popular gambling and drinking establishment, where he had called and spoken with his agent, when he came upon construction barriers at a bridge previously washed away by a flash flood. A work crew watched as he was unable to brake in time, and his car swerved twice then rolled into a gully, pinning his body beneath.[4] A large polished aluminum suitcase containing a large sum of money, traveler's checks and jewels, which he had placed on the package shelf behind him flew forward and struck Mix in the back of the head, shattering his skull and breaking his neck. The 60-year-old actor was killed almost instantly. Eyewitnesses said Mix was traveling at 80 mph before the accident.[5]
A small stone memorial marks the site of his death on State Route 79, and the nearby gully is named "Tom Mix Wash". The plaque on the marker bears the inscription: "In memory of Tom Mix whose spirit left his body on this spot and whose characterization and portrayals in life served to better fix memories of the old West in the minds of living men." Mix is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
Legacy
Tom Mix was "the King of Cowboys" when Ronald Reagan and John Wayne were youngsters and the influence of his screen persona can be seen in their approach to portraying cowboys. When an injury caused football player John Wayne to drop out of USC, Tom Mix helped him get a job moving props in the back lot of Fox Studios.
By most accounts, Tom Mix made 336 movies throughout his career. As of 2007, only about 10% of these were reportedly available for viewing, although it was unclear how many of these films are now considered lost films.
For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Tom Mix has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1708 Vine Street. His cowboy boot prints, palm prints and his famous horse Tony's hoof prints are at Grauman's Chinese Theatre at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard. In 1958 he was inducted posthumously into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In 1959 a 'Monument To The Stars' was erected on Beverly Dr. (where it intersects with Olympic Blvd. and becomes Beverwil) in Beverly Hills. The memorial consists of a bronze-green spiral of sprocketed "camera film" above a multi-sided tower, embossed with full-length likenesses of early stars who appeared in famous silent movies. Those memorialized include Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Will Rogers, Conrad Nagel, Rudolph Valentino, Fred Niblo, Tom Mix, and Harold Lloyd. There is a Tom Mix museum in Dewey, Oklahoma and another in Mix Run, Pennsylvania. Between 1980 and 2004, 21 Tom Mix festivals were held during the month of September, most of them in DuBois, Pennsylvania.
Cultural references
By the 21st century, most people were more familiar with Tom Mix's name through the many cultural references which have echoed long after his death, rather than from having seen his films. Cereal boxtop premiums (radio premiums) from the 1940s relating to Mix are still traded by collectors. Mix was referred to in Conny Froboess' 1951 song "Pack' die Badehose ein" and in a 1953 Dinah Washington song, "TV Is the Thing This Year" for EmArcy Records (signifying a change in technology from radio to television).
In the JD Salinger short story "The Laughing Man", the Chief is described as having "the most photogenic features of Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix."
In 1967, Mix was featured with many other 20th century celebrities on the cover of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig, archival footage is shown of Mix attending a party at Hearst Castle near San Simeon, California.
Bruce Willis played Tom Mix in the 1988 Blake Edwards film Sunset, with James Garner as Wyatt Earp. The film was very loosely based on the fact that Earp and Mix knew each other when Earp was serving as a consultant during the silent film era.
In The Beverly Hillbillies, Jed Clampett's reason for going to Beverly Hills was to live in the same place as Tom Mix.
Daryl Ponicsan's novel Tom Mix Died for Your Sins (1975) evokes Mix's life and personality. Clifford Irving offered a pseudo-autobiographical version of Mix's early adulthood, drawing him as a brash young gringo who befriends and then joins up with the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in the novel Tom Mix and Pancho Villa (1982).
In the 2008 movie Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, the mysterious little boy claiming to be Walter Collins finally confesses to the police that the reason he ran away to Los Angeles was in hopes of meeting Tom Mix and his horse Tony.
In the children's novel "Letters From Rifka" by "Karen Hesse", the protagonist Rifka Nebrot mentions learning the English language by reading comic books about a cowboy named Tom Mix who shoots at bad guys.
James Horwitz's book They Went Thataway (1975) ends with Horwitz visiting Tom Mix Wash (where Mix died) and leaving his childhood cowboy boots at the foot of the monument.
A resurrected Tom Mix appeared in two of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld novels, The Dark Design (1977) and The Magic Labyrinth (1980) as a traveling companion of Jack London, along with a short story featured in the anthology Riverworld and Other Stories (1979).
In the "Mulcahy's War" episode of M*A*S*H Father Mulcahy used a Tom Mix pocket knife to perform an emergency tracheotomy (1976).
Philip K. Dick's sci-fi novel The Penultimate Truth features an underground bunker named 'the Tom Mix'.
In Batman/Houdini: The Devil's Workshop (1993), Tom Mix is a high profile figure in Gotham society, and takes up Houdini's offer of a free punch to the stomach.
In an episode of Raw Toonage, Bonkers D. Bobcat plays a cowboy character named "Trail Mix Bonkers", an obvious homage to Tom Mix, as well as a play on both his name and trail mix.
The menacing cowboy character in David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive contains oblique references to Mix.
The ghost of Tom Mix haunted a Hollywood couple in the supernatural thriller The Ghosts of Edendale (2004).
Ralston-Purina briefly revived its Tom Mix boxtop fan club during the 1980s, and in 2007 had Tom Mix pages on the company's website.
Tom Mix is mentioned as being a pall bearer and weeping at the funeral for Wyatt Earp at the beginning of the end credits for the 1993 George P. Cosmatos film Tombstone.
In the Doctor Who episode "The Gunfighters", the TARDIS lands at Tombstone, Arizona in 1881, where the Doctor says he doesn't understand why they want to dress like Tom Mix.
The United States Postal Service has commemorated Tom Mix on a first-class mail postage stamp.
In Salt-Water Moon, by Canadian playwright David French, Jacob describes watching "The Lucky Horseshoe", calling it "one of the best Tom ever made," and tries to seduce Mary when describing it.
Italian comic series Captain Miki was renamed by comics calligrapher Ferdi Sayışman as "Captain Tom Mix" (Yüzbaşı Tommiks) in the 70s, and comics are being published with this name till today.
In the series Bewitched in the episode "Serena's Youth Pill", Darin tries to convince young Larry Tate to drink the magic antidote by telling him it would help Larry grow up to be a cowboy like Tom Mix.
In the 2010 Boardwalk Empire episode "The Emerald City", Nucky Thompson's servant Eddie Kessler offers to frisk someone who's come to see him. Nucky chides him: "You're Tom Mix all of a sudden?"[6]
Filmography
References
Further reading
- Robert S. Birchard, "King Cowboy: Tom Mix and the Movies" Burbank: Riverwood Press, 1993 ISBN 1880756056
- Ben Ohmart, It's That Time Again Albany: BearManor Media, 2002 ISBN 0-9714570-2-6.
- David W. Menefee, The First Male Stars: Men of the Silent Era Albany: Bear Manor Media, 2007.
- Olive Stokes Mix with Eric Heath, The Fabulous Tom Mix, New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1957.
- Paul E. Mix, The Life and Legend of Tom Mix, New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1972.
- Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars, 1999 ISBN 0-8195-6451-6. (chapter on Tom Mix and William S. Hart)
- Richard D. Jensen, "The Amazing Tom Mix: The Most Famous Cowboy of the Movies" iUniverse, Inc, 2005 ISBN 0595359493 ISBN 978-0595359493.
External links
