The Man Who Played Batman, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein Also Doubled for Young John Wayne

In 1943, an Ohio movie theater screened Batman at its Saturday matinee and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman at its late-night horror show, on the same day and in the same building.  The exterior marquee advertised two completely different types of emotions for two completely different audiences, who had no reason to think that the entertainment of the day had anything in common beyond the address where it was displayed.

  The man who doubled for Batman that afternoon and the man who doubled for the werewolf that night were the same person.  No one in any of the audiences had any way of knowing, and no one involved in any of the productions would have thought to mention it, because in Hollywood in 1943, the identity of a stunt double was simply not information that anyone considered worth sharing.

  This is the story of that man and a question that John Wayne answered once, decades later , without ever fully explaining what he meant.  Edwin Parker was born on December 12, 1900 in Waukegan, Illinois , a lake town north of Chicago that produced, in the following decades, an unusual number of men who ended up making a living doing dangerous things in front of the cameras, a fact that no one who has studied it has been able to fully explain and that may be just a coincidence.

  He wasn’t one of those who grew up wanting to be in the movies.    He grew up wanting to be an athlete.  And, according to everyone, he was a genuinely gifted athlete.  Strong-shouldered, fast for his size, the kind of physique that made him stand out in any sport he tried.  In boxing in particular, where he supposedly had so much natural ability that friends and family assumed for a time that he could make a career out of it before Hollywood came along.

  That same combination of brute strength and genuine athletic coordination, more than any acting ambition, was exactly what the stuntman business of the time was designed to exploit, and it would end up taking him much further than the boxing ring ever could, into a career that spanned genres and decades that no boxing promoter of that era could have predicted for him.

He headed west to Hollywood around 1931, in his 30s, older than most men starting out in a business that generally preferred its newcomers young and unattached, with fewer years of physical wear and tear on their bodies.  I had no contacts.  He had no screen test scheduled and no studio contract waiting for him when he got off the train.

  What he had was a body made for physical labor and a willingness to let people hurt him on camera for a day’s pay, which, in Hollywood in 1931, was a set of qualifications more employable than most people today would imagine.  Before we continue, please tell us what part of the world you ‘re watching from and take the opportunity to subscribe while you’re here.

  The stunt double business in the early 1930s operated almost entirely by recommendation, with no significant union protections, no standardized pay scales, and no safety equipment beyond what a resourceful man could improvise on the spot.  If a coordinator needed a big man for a fall, someone would mention Parker. Parker would show up, do the fall, get paid in cash at the end of the day most of the time, and end up being recommended when someone else needed a big man.

  That was the entire hiring process: informal, based on words, and entirely dependent on the stunt double’s reputation within a small circle of coordinators who constantly talked to each other and remembered exactly who could be trusted with a dangerous scene and who could n’t.  And he was moving fast enough that, within a couple of years, Edwin Parker, whom everyone was already calling simply Eddie, was making his way onto the B-movie western circuit , the same precarious and dynamic corner of the industry where a tall, awkward former USC football player was also trying to

find steady work under the name of John Wayne.  Their paths crossed very soon.  Parker was Wayne’s stunt double in at least two of his low-budget westerns from that period, *The Star Packer* and *Neath the Arizona Skies*, films shot in a few days with minimal budgets, where the same handful of stunt doubles rotated through almost all productions because there was no one else available who knew how to fall off a horse without breaking their neck in the attempt.

  They were the kind of movies that nobody expected to be remembered for anything , mass-produced for double features and Saturday matinees.  The work itself is repetitive and dangerous in almost equal measure.  A fall from a galloping horse carried exactly the same risk, regardless of whether the film ended up being important to the history of cinema or disappeared forever in a studio vault.

  Wayne, in those years, was just one more face among dozens trying to get noticed in an industry that constantly consumed B-movie western stars.  A former USC football player who had lost his athletic scholarship due to an injury while body surfing and who came to film almost by accident, working as a prop man before anyone even thought of putting him in front of a camera.

  Parker was just another stunt double among dozens, doing the same routine of falls, fights, and horseback riding that kept that whole precarious machine running, indistinguishable on any given morning from the half-dozen other big men waiting outside the same casting office for the day’s work.  Neither of them had any way of knowing, in that dusty field outside Los Angeles in the early 1930s, sweating through the same repetitive setups under the same harsh California sun, which of them the 20th century would remember by name, and which one would spend the rest of their life

being the answer to a trivia question that almost no one would think to ask. If you’re the type of person who likes to discover what happened to men that history often overlooks, this is a good time to hit the like button before continuing.  What happened to Eddie Parker during the next three decades is a trajectory almost too strange to summarize clearly, because he did not specialize in any type of film as most of the specialists of his time eventually did.

  She worked everywhere, in every genre the studios produced, under every kind of mask and disguise the costume department could create .  In 1936, he participated in Flash Gordon, the series that introduced a whole generation of Saturday morning moviegoers to science fiction on screen.  A low-budget but immensely popular production, built around ray guns, spaceships, and a hero fighting his way through an alien planet.

  None of which would have seemed remotely convincing without specialists willing to be thrown, dragged, and set on fire inside disguises that offered almost no protection.  In 1939, he participated in Buck Rogers, another series, another spaceship.  Another round of dangerous scenes performed inside a costume that completely concealed his face .

  Part of the same small, overworked group of Hollywood specialists who quietly built the entire visual language of American science fiction adventure without any of them becoming a household name for it.  Then, in 1943, Columbia Pictures prepared a 15- chapter series simply called Batman, the first time the character appeared on screen in any form, just 4 years after his comic book debut and decades before he became one of the most valuable intellectual properties in American entertainment history , spawning a multi-billion dollar franchise whose on-screen lineage traces

back to this low-budget war series .  Almost no one involved in that low-budget 1943 production could have imagined what the character would become, and almost no one today, seeing the polished multimillion-dollar versions of it, has any reason to think about the cheap war series that started it all, much less the uncredited stuntman who did the real physical work inside that first rudimentary costume.

  Lewis Wilson played Batman in the foreground, a role that would end up being the only major credit of his acting career.  Eddie Parker did the falls, the fights, and the physical work that the production couldn’t risk having its star do, wearing a hood and cape sewn on a shoestring budget and without the engineering that later Batman costumes would receive, in front of children who had no idea that the man under the mask was the same one who, years before, fell off horses in a John Wayne movie that almost no one remembered.  These films were

made and released in the midst of World War II, a fact that shaped the entire industry around it in ways that are rarely mentioned when people talk today about Universal’s classic horror.  The virgin film was rationed. Fit young men were becoming increasingly scarce in any study, either recruited or enlisted in a war that was transforming every industry in the country.

  Parker himself, who was already over 40 when the United States entered the war, was outside the main conscription age, which meant that the stunt business, unlike much of Hollywood’s technical workforce, maintained a steady supply of experienced men precisely when the public’s appetite for monster movies and heroic serials was greatest .

  The public in 1943 lived with genuine daily anxiety over a war with no guaranteed end, rationing at home, casualty lists in newspapers, children and husbands abroad, and the fictional terrors that Universal sold them.  A man who turned into a wolf, a corpse stitched up and reanimated, offered a specific kind of fear, contained and manageable, which was resolved in 90 minutes and from which one could walk away at the end of the film, something that real news from the war never allowed.

  Eddie Parker’s uncredited work was, in a very straightforward sense, part of the machinery that kept the country distracted from something considerably worse than anything that happened on screen.  A small, unacknowledged contribution to national morale that no one at the time would have described in those terms, much less Parker himself , who almost certainly viewed the job as nothing more than a paycheck for a physically demanding day’s work .

  That same year, Universal Pictures was deep into the second act of what is now called the Universal Monsters era, an assembly line of horror films built around Frankenstein’s monster , Dracula, and the studio’s newest addition, the Wolf Man, played by Lon Chaney Jr. with makeup that took hours to apply and was miserable to wear for an entire day of filming.

  Yak hair glued strand by strand to Chaney’s face and hands , a process so uncomfortable that Chaney himself supposedly feared it more than any physical acrobatics the role required.  Universal needed men who could endure physical punishment inside heavy latex and leather without complaining.  For less money than the stars were paid , they were willing to be thrown against fake furniture and roll down stairs while almost blind under a mask with hardly any peripheral vision .

  And Eddie Parker became, throughout that decade, the studio’s most reliable answer to that need.  He was Lon Chaney Jr.’s stunt double as the Wolfman.  He was Bela Lugosi’s double as Frankenstein’s monster .  The makeup itself, designed by legendary Universal artist Jack Pierce, was a daily ordeal, no matter who wore it .

  Hours in a chair before dawn to glue yak hair strand by strand to the face and hands, and more hours to remove it after a full day of physical work done with it on.  Whoever wore Pierce’s monster designs on any given day, whether the credited star or their uncredited double , was subjected to a level of daily physical discomfort that had nothing to do with stunts, but simply with existing inside the costume for 12 hours straight.

  In Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, released that same year of 1943, he worked on both sides of the film’s central fight inside two different monster costumes on two different shooting days, so that , in a very literal sense, when the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s monster clashed on screen for the first time in film history, in a fight that the public had been waiting for since the film’s announcement, the body of one man absorbed the physical labor of both.

  It wasn’t the first time in Hollywood history that a stuntman fought against himself under two different names, nor would it be the last, but it captured something particular about the business around which Eddie Parker had built his life.  A business where the public’s perception of two opposing forces clashing on screen could fall entirely on the shoulders, literally, of an exhausted man doing the same job twice.

A rumor arose sometime during that decade, and never completely disappeared , that it was actually Eddie Parker, not Bela Lugosi, who played Frankenstein’s monster in certain scenes of that film, including close-ups, when Lugosi’s schedule or stamina did not allow for a particular day of filming to be covered.

  Lugosi, at that time , was over 60 years old and had never enjoyed particularly robust health, and the monster’s heavy boots and his heavy, stiff walk were considerably more tiring for him to maintain during long days of filming than the public came to appreciate.  Universal never officially confirmed the rumor, following the industry’s custom at the time of protecting the illusion that a single actor and a single face belonged to a role, when the physical reality behind the camera was often much more complicated than the credits suggested, and the studios had every

commercial incentive to keep that complication as invisible as the stunt doubles who performed it.  Since the public that paid to see the face of a specific star had no interest in knowing how often that face had been, for a moment, someone else’s.  Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi, according to most accounts, were grateful to have a reliable and uncomplaining stunt double for the physically demanding sequences, and both made clear elsewhere a genuine respect for the stunt doubles who relieved them of the worst

daily physical strain, although neither made a particular public effort to have those men credited or remembered individually.  By the early 1950s, and working steadily, Parker took on a role that Universal actually allowed him to keep his name on, at least within the credits that nobody read.  In ” Abbott and Costello Meet Dr.

 Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” released in 1953, he played the monstrous physical side of Mr. Hyde in the action sequences, replacing Karloff, who by then was over 60, whenever the transformation required something more athletic than the older actor could safely offer , leaping across rooftops and smashing sets in a role based on exactly the same principle that had guided Parker’s entire career.

  Let the famous face handle the close-ups, and let the invisible man handle everything the camera couldn’t afford to risk.  Two years later, in “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy,” Parker finally got to be the complete monster, credited fully bandaged as Clarice the Mummy, crawling through a comedy after two decades of being other men’s shadow inside other people’s costumes , a small but genuine rectification after 20 years of a career built almost entirely on the fact that nobody knew his name.

  Although the credit came, quite appropriately, in a light comedy, no one involved expected to be remembered as anything more than a modest filler production for the studio. In the midst of all this, in 1954, Alfred Hitchcock needed stunt doubles for “Rear Window,” a film built almost entirely around a single apartment and a photographer in a wheelchair observing his neighbors.

  A production unlikely to be a stunt double at first glance, given the small amount of the film that involves anything resembling traditional action, but which still required a stunt double for its climactic physical confrontation between the photographer and the man he suspects of murder.  It was a sequence that Hitchcock, meticulous as ever, wanted to look genuinely dangerous rather than simply staged, and Eddie Parker was also credited for it.

  A single entry within a filmography that at that time encompassed dozens of films of all genres that Hollywood knew how to produce, from the cheapest B-movie western to one of the most meticulously crafted thrillers produced by a great director of the time.  If any part of this interests you, now is a great time to subscribe.

  There are many more stories like this one from where that one came from .  There were no noteworthy specialist coordinator unions during the years when Parker was doing his most dangerous work.  There were no standardized safety checks, nor any guaranteed compensation if a fall went wrong or if a costume caught fire due to a poorly placed spotlight, a real and recurring danger given the number of monster costumes and rubber masks of the time that remained within a few feet of the hot studio lights for hours at a time.  Men in his

line of work regularly broke bones and were expected to return to the set within days if they wanted to continue being employed. A serious injury did not come with compensation.  He came, most of the time, with the silent agreement that the coordinator would call someone else next time and that the injured man’s mortgage payment was now a problem he had to solve himself.

  The stuntmen of that generation would exchange stories, usually after a few drinks, about colleagues who had broken their backs in bad falls, lost fingers due to poorly prepared props, or simply disappeared from the business altogether after an injury that no one outside the immediate team knew about, because there was no news value in a stuntman’s shattered knee in the same way there would have been with a star’s.

  What connects a Flash Gordon spaceship with Batman’s cowl, the Wolfman’s fur, Frankenstein’s stitched face, or a mummy’s bandages is not, in the end, a common thread of genre or study.  It is a man’s willingness to disappear completely into whatever the work of the day required, decade after decade, without ever building a public identity of his own from any of it.

Throughout his career, Parker appeared in some role in more than 45 serials alone, not counting the dozens of individual feature films that added to that number.  A body of work large enough that no single researcher has been able to produce a complete and fully verified account, because much of the work was not credited by design and because studies of that era treated an individual specialist’s contribution as something more like a disposable resource than a career worthy of being documented for posterity.  He

married a woman named Bess sometime during these years, though almost nothing of their life together outside the studio system made it onto any record that anyone bothered to save, which was typical of how completely a stuntman’s personal life could disappear from history along with his professional life, leaving behind for anyone curious decades later little more than a name on a census and a filmography with more gaps than confirmed entries.

Meanwhile, the tall former soccer player whom he once doubled in a couple of forgettable B-movie westerns had taken a completely different path.  John Wayne became, during that same span of decades, the most recognizable face in American cinema, the opposite of everything that Eddie Parker’s career represented.

  Wayne’s entire fame was built on being instantly identifiable, unmistakable.  The same man in every frame whom the audience could instantly name before he had said a single word.  His walk and voice were so distinctive that imitators built entire careers on them before Wayne himself had even finished making movies. His recognizability was so total that decades after his death, a simple silhouette on a movie poster was still enough to tell audiences exactly what movie they were about to see.

Parker’s entire career was built on the opposite, on being whoever the take required and no one in particular once he dropped the disguise, making sure that the specific physical signature that had made him recognizable enough to be hired in the first place disappeared completely on whatever paper the day’s call sheet demanded.

  Wayne never forgot the men who taught him the physical side of the business when he was still finding his way on the same B-movie western circuit where Parker worked.  Decades later, when interviewed about his early years for a project chronicling his own career, Wayne named several of them specifically, men whose faces the public never knew, crediting them with skills that ended up defining his entire on-screen persona: the walk, the fighting style, the physical bearing that a hundred imitators would spend the rest of the century trying to copy without

ever really understanding where it came from.  Among the men Wayne named from those years was a stuntman named Tom Bay, a name that meant nothing to the interviewer and means nothing to almost anyone today.  And Wayne, without giving further details, called him one of the toughest men he had ever met.    He never explained exactly what Bay had done to earn that specific description, and no one thought to press him about it at the time.

  It became, like much of what happened in that era of Hollywood, a private trial about a private man made public only once and never repeated. Whatever Tom Bay actually did to earn that specific lawsuit from a man who took hundreds of punches, real and simulated, over a 50- year career, went with both men to the grave.

  Eddie Parker’s name came up in the same conversation about those years, along with another specialist, Alan Pomeroy , whom Wayne credited as one of the men he worked directly with to develop a specific cinematic technique: a way of throwing a punch in front of the camera that looked devastating but did n’t connect with anything at all.

Timed with such precision with respect to the camera angle that the public completed the impact for themselves, never noticing the 15 centimeters of empty air through which the fist actually passed.  A piece of applied physics disguised as a stuntman’s trick, achieved through trial and error across dozens of takes in films that no one thought would last beyond the year they were released.

  It is a method that is still taught to action specialists today, under different names in different countries.  One of the small handful of genuine technical inventions that a few anonymous working-class specialists delivered to an entire century of cinema without patenting anything or collecting a penny in royalties.

  “It was easily twice as effective and realistic,” Wayne wrote of the innovation decades later, decades after he had developed it on the dirt outside a B-movie Western set with men whose names never made it onto a marquee, men who spent their entire careers making others look brave, strong, and great, while they themselves remained almost unknown to the public that benefited from their work every time they bought a ticket.

  None of these men sought public credit for any of this, and by the standards of an industry that has always been comfortable letting a single face represent an entire invisible team.  None of them received much, a pattern that remained in effect throughout the studio system and in every production department, not just among the specialists.

  Today, Tom Bay is just a phrase in a handful of retrospective articles about the beginning of Wayne’s career, with no date of birth, no date of death, no photograph, and no other biography at all.  He said or did something impressive enough that John Wayne remembered him for the rest of his life and mentioned him by name decades later.

  And that’s almost the entire historical record of the man, a life reduced for anyone looking back now to eight words spoken by someone else.  Eddie Parker at least left behind a filmography, a documentary trail of credited and uncredited work spanning almost three decades and dozens of films, which is more than most men in his line of work were able to achieve.

  But even that filmography doesn’t do him justice, because much of his work was specifically designed to erase any evidence that he had done it.  The professional standard of excellence for a stunt double is, precisely, invisibility.  The better Eddie Parker did his job, the less reason the audience had to even think about him.

  He continued working until 1960, his last year, taking charge of coordinating risk scenes in Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick’s immense Roman epic starring Kirk Douglas;  A production as far removed from the 15- chapter Batman serials or Universal’s monster movies as was possible in that Hollywood, involving thousands of extras, complex battle choreography, and a scale of physical production that dwarfed almost everything the industry had attempted before, with a budget that reached millions of dollars, at a time when Parker’s early B-movie westerns were shot for a few

thousand each.  That Eddie Parker, at 59, still had the necessary confidence to assume coordination responsibilities in a production of such magnitude and prestige was, in itself, a testament to the great variety and reliability he had built over a 30-year career that never made him famous.  A career that somehow took him from cheap B-movie westerns to Saturday afternoon serials, through Universal’s horror assembly line and into a Kirk Douglas epic, without the public ever needing to learn his name .  He died of a

heart attack on January 20, 1960 in Panorama City, California, at the age of 59, shortly after finishing his work on that film.  The physical toll of three decades of falls, fights, and punishments inside heavy costumes finally took its toll on a body that dedicated its entire working life to absorbing what other, more famous bodies couldn’t risk receiving.

  Spartacus would go on to win four Academy Awards and become one of the defining epics of its decade, a legacy to which Eddie Parker contributed and which he did not get to see fully realized as he died before the film hit theaters that October.  He was buried in Calvary Cemetery. Industry publications mentioned his passing with one or two brief lines, the standard courtesy extended to a stuntman of that generation.

  A paragraph buried long after any film news that was more commercially interesting that week, tucked away among casting announcements and box office receipts that history, in most cases, has forgotten just as deeply, and then the industry moved on, as it always did, to the next film and the next group of men willing to suffer the falls that stars couldn’t afford to risk.

  There was no Academy Award for him, neither honorary nor otherwise.  There was no widely read memoir.  There was no farewell toast that was repeated for decades afterward.  What did exist was 30 years of a man being assigned the parts of the job that were too dangerous, uncomfortable, or physically demanding for the famous name on the contract, doing it so thoroughly and effectively that most of the public who watched him work never had the slightest idea that they were watching him.

There is a specific irony worth reflecting on, one that neither Universal nor Parker himself seem to have ever mentioned publicly.  The entire business of monster movies consists of hiding a human face behind a fabricated one, asking the audience to believe that the person under the latex and fur has become something completely different for the duration of the film.

  Eddie Parker spent his career being literally erased by that same mechanism over and over again in Universal’s biggest horror productions;  a man whose real face was never meant for the public to see, achieving the same trick as the monsters, only one level further removed from everyone’s view .

  Consider for a moment what that Ohio moviegoer in 1943 actually experienced on that very day, a day that would have seemed to him like two completely unrelated afternoons of entertainment instead of a continuous performance by the same tired and bruised man.  In the afternoon, in a movie theater that probably smelled of popcorn and cigarette smoke, surrounded by a crowd of children more interested in the sweets than the credits, he watched a costumed vigilante jump over rooftops and get beaten up by armed criminals, thrilled by the physical daring, never wondering who

was taking those blows under the hood or how many times the same scene had to be repeated before the coordinator was satisfied.  That night, probably before a completely different, more adult audience, drawn by the promise of monsters rather than serialized heroism, he sat in the same movie theater and watched two of the most terrifying creatures of the time clash in a fog-shrouded wooded setting, unaware that the same body had done the physical work for both creatures on different days, months apart, breathing through two

types of prosthetics that restricted his vision and movement in equally miserable ways.  He went home after spending a whole day entertained by Eddie Parker twice, in two completely different costumes and genres, and he would never have connected the two experiences because that disconnection was precisely the goal of the work Parker spent his entire career perfecting.

  If someone had told him upon leaving the cinema that the same man was inside both disguises, he probably wouldn’t have believed it and would have had no way of verifying it.  John Wayne was seen throughout 50 years and 150 films. That was the entire architecture of his fame , deliberately built and carefully maintained for five decades.

  The same unmistakable walk, voice, and presence in every film, instantly recognizable in a way that almost no other actor in the history of the medium ever achieved so completely.  A recognizability that became, in itself, the product that the public paid for every time they bought a ticket. Eddie Parker, for roughly the same three decades, was specifically and professionally invisible, by design, as the total measure of how well he did his job.

The acrobatics of Batman, the fights of the Wolf Man, the heavy strength of Frankenstein’s monster, the violence of Mr. Hyde, the walk of a mummy, the first falls of a young John Wayne, before anyone, including Wayne himself, had any idea what that name would eventually mean to the world, or that the clumsy young man attempting his own stunts on those worn-out sets would spend the rest of the century being imitated by strangers who never had to learn how to actually land a real punch.

  A man spent his career being unmistakable.  Another spent his time making sure that no one could mistake him for anything at all, which, viewed from a sufficient distance, turns out to be his own very specific and demanding kind of skill.  One that Hollywood has never managed to properly credit, neither then nor now. A skill measured entirely by its successful erasure, where the best possible performance leaves no trace of the performer.

  No fingerprints, no signature, nothing that a future audience could recognize even if they searched for it on purpose.  There is still no competitive category at the Academy Awards for stunt work, decades after Eddie Parker’s death and decades after men like him began to advocate that the work deserved one. Specialist and artist coordinators have petitioned the Academy for a dedicated category since at least the 1960s, pointing out, reasonably, that an entire discipline central to the cinematic experience for 100 years has never been

formally recognized on the industry’s biggest night , even as categories for far more specific technical achievements have come and gone. Every few years, someone in the industry raises the issue again, sometimes with real impetus, and every few years, for reasons that have more to do with the length of the television broadcast and industry politics than with the merit of the argument, nothing changes.

Film historians and dedicated horror fans, those who spend their time reviewing old studio records and specialist logs looking for exactly these kinds of hidden credits, have spent decades reconstructing Eddie Parker’s actual filmography as much as the surviving documentation allows , cross-referencing pay stubs, call sheets, and the occasional interview with older crew members.

  And even their most careful accounting leads to educated guesses and probable attributions in more places than anyone would like. Because the studios of that era simply didn’t bother to keep the kind of records that would allow a modern researcher to say with absolute certainty who wore which disguise on which specific day.

So, the next time an old serial or monster movie pops up in some late-night rerun , and a masked figure takes a fall that looks like it should hurt considerably more than the star’s contract could have covered, consider that the person underneath might be a face you never learned to recognize, doing the one job Hollywood has always relied on and never quite figured out how to see.

  He was Batman before Batman was worth anything, before the character had a single blockbuster movie or a merchandise empire tied to his name, when the whole project was a cheap Saturday serial that no one expected to matter in 10 years, let alone 80. He was the Wolf Man and the creature the Wolf Man fought.  He was Dr. Jekyll’s fists and, eventually, his own mummy, wrapped from head to toe in bandages that finally, for once, had his real name in the credits .

  And decades before all that, on a dirt field outside of Los Angeles , he was simply the man who caught a tall, clumsy football player when he fell off a horse for the first time, years before that same young man became the most recognizable face that American cinema has ever produced. Both spent their lives in front of the same cameras, in the same studios , in the same industry, working towards what seemed from a distance to be similar goals.

Only one of them was allowed to be seen.  If this story stayed with you, that’s all the reason to tell it.  Hit subscribe and we’ll see you next time .