“It is certainly funny how things work out,” Cody wrote in his autobiography. “Here I’d struggled in the movie business all my life … and just as I get into the big time … I become recognized as the Indian who cried in a TV ad. The Great Spirit moves in mysterious ways.”
So
did Cody, who embodied contradictions within his Indianness and his humanity.
In his autobiography he called it a “double life,” Indian brave and movie
man. In the end the cinéaste would work to honor the brave. But
at the start Cody was in it for the money, the adventure and the sex.
Cody’s father, Thomas Longplume Cody, had been in Wild Bill Cody’s touring cowboy and Indian show. Later Thomas Longplume became a “phony veterinarian,” a charlatan who covertly lamed the horses he treated, then bought them from their owners on the cheap. He raised cattle, too.When a film crew showed up at the family’s Oklahoma ranch in 1919 and offered to pay cash to use it to shoot scenes in a movie, Thomas Longplume agreed. Later, invited by Hollywood moviemakers to work in westerns, Thomas Longplume and young Iron Eyes moved to Hollywood.
In Hollywood the Codys became general contractors for the new genre of westerns. They amassed a collection of Indian costumes and artifacts that they rented out to moviemakers. They acted in movies and wrangled extras to portray Indians, including, intriguingly, “unemployed Italian bricklayers.” They served as technical advisors, helping moviemakers produce “authentic” Indians. Thomas Longplume soon dropped out of Hollywood, a casualty of alcohol.
The coming of sound movies provided new opportunities for Iron Eyes:
After sound came in, practically all the whoops you’ve heard when the
Indians dance around campfires or charge the wagon are mine, pre-recorded.
Never did get any rights to those whoops. Would be a millionaire by now
if I had.
In the 20s and 30s he seems to have worked with every star and director in westerns. He helped create the Hollywood savage Indian who is implacably opposed to the upright, civilized white man. When the covered wagons were circled, it was Cody’s trained horses that galloped by and then tripped in an explosion of dust as the mounted brave fell. It was Cody’s costume the brave was wearing. It was Cody’s whoops that sent chills down the pretty white woman’s spine. It was the prize-winning marksman Cody’s arrow that pierced the upright’s settler’s hat (the pierced actor would be wearing a protective iron skull cap that Cody stocked for such shots). The man was a walking, talking wigwam stocked with stereotypes of Native American bad behavior.
He found plenty of time for bad behavior in real life too, mixing it up with movie star pals like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, and just about everybody else who ever strapped on a pair of spurs before a camera. His accounts of booze-sodden womanizing with these stars are a highlight of his memoir Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian. It was Cody who shot an arrow through W.C. Fields’ top hat in a famous scene from My Little Chickadee. After the cast party for that movie, Fields treated Cody to a hilarious night at a Mexican brothel.
Early on Cody had married Bertha (Birdie) Darkcloud, a Seneca Indian and the daughter of the anthropologist Arthur C. Parker, who dreamed up National Indian Day. Birdie herself became an anthropologist, but got little help from her husband, who was usually too busy making movies, carousing with his Hollywood pals and screwing groupies to attend to her. The couple stayed together, but their relationship was always tense at best. Birdie tended to keep quiet and then throw weapons at him.
When not working in films, Cody toured the world as an Indian dancer and even ran a troupe of braves through a snake dance for the Ringling Brothers Circus. During WWII he quit Hollywood and found work as a shipyard welder, where he proudly spied on fellow workers for the FBI.
After the war he returned to the movies, working with directors like
Cecil B. Demille and John Ford on many of the classic late westerns. He
met Howard Hughes while working on The Outlaw, the first western that was,
as Cody said, “sold solely on the basis of sex.” It starred Jane Russell.
Hughes, a designer of aircraft, created a special aerodynamic garment for
her heaving breasts. (It was the first “Cross-Your-Heart” bra.) Minor Indian
star Ben Johnson spoke for generations of movie viewers when he exclaimed
on the set, “Damn! Will you look at those tits!” Hughes promptly banned
all unnecessary staff from Russell’s scenes. Cody retained a dislike for
Hughes, who forced the dignified Cody to retrieve Hughes’ golf balls at
a driving range.
By the 50s Cody was becoming transformed into a family man and a defender of his people. Gone were the saturnalian binges with stars. Cody got involved in the nascent Native American movement. He became a stickler for authenticity in the portrayal of Indians. He became relatively faithful to his long-suffering wife, who bore him two sons. He became an authority on Indian culture, building up his “Moosehead Museum” of artifacts based in part on his movie prop collection. He boasted that it was the largest private collection of Indian artifacts anywhere. He wrote a book on Indian sign language that became a text for the Boy Scouts. He introduced one of his sons to peyote and publicly defended its religious use in Native American ceremonies. He also worked for Walt Disney on a number of serials, including Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. His vision of pure American Indian culture remained heterodox.
He insisted that Indians should spurn separatism from American culture, while still retaining their ethnicity. Yet he was not an ethnopath – he appeared as an Indian in several Bob Hope films and also in a Bowery Boys number. His career continued into the 70s and 80s, with appearances in A Man Called Horse (1970) and Ernest Goes to Camp (1987).
By the time the “Crying Indian” PSA for Keep America Beautiful appeared, Cody was offended at all stereotypes of Indians – whether as a brutal savage, a noble innocent, or a humorless stone wall. He insisted that Indians were diverse, fascinating people who deserved dignity and were given a raw deal in America. He felt a growing environmental awareness. The PSA made him an international star. The Emperor of Japan even requested to meet him on a visit to Los Angeles. “You cry man, cry man,” the delighted Emperor told Cody.
A mystery remains. In 1996 the new Orleans Times Picayune ran an article claiming that Cody’s real name was Oscar Corti. The article claimed that Cody’s father was an Italian immigrant named De Corti who had gotten in trouble with the New Orleans Mafia, the “Black Hand.” (Recall the unemployed Italian bricklayers Cody found so easy to recruit as “Indian” extras.) Young Oscar escaped west with his mother and siblings. “He always wanted to be an Indian,” his purported sister recalled in the article. Other details in the article make the case plausible. Although Cody vehemently denied the report, he took no legal action. “All I know is that I’m just another Indian,” told the Times Picayune. If we are ever to know the truth it will have to be from a reporter with a bigger expense account than this one.
Collin Perry, who ghost-wrote Iron Eyes’ autobiography, says it doesn’t really matter whether Cody was really an Indian. “When I interviewed him it was like talking to a plains Indian,” Perry said. “His heart was out there riding his horse and shooting buffalo. But there were two warring factions in his life, the wild Hollywood guy, and the Native American in him that sought spiritual things.” Perry also says that he accepts Cody’s claims – “his honesty betrays the truth of the matter.”
When Cody stood by the road, a tear trickling down his face in his famous PSA, it was said of him that the tear was faked. In his memoir Iron Eyes said that he cried on cue, but the real tear didn’t photograph as well as a faked one.
Real or fake, his tear summed up the career of an Indian who moved the
planet. He was 94.
