Boots Morphy

Two tragic love stories -- one made up for the movies and one true; both involving guns.

Bart Tare, the troubled hero of Gun Crazy (1950), didn't care much about anything in the world apart from guns -- that is, not until today, when he set eyes on this carnival sharpshooter, Annie Laurie Starr. He's never seen a woman do the things with a pistol that she can do. He’s a crack shot himself, with a “dangerous mania” for guns that has already cost him a spell in reform school, and, watching her amazing display of trick shots, he falls instantly in love. He’s called from the audience to match his skill with a gun against Laurie's in a contest in which each of them must face death, allowing the other to shoot at targets that are attached to their heads. It's an insane thing for either of them to do, but, somehow, their attraction is so immediate, so strong and so deep that they barely need to have spoken before each is willing to give the other the power to end their life. In the aftermath, the smoke from their pistols fills the space between them, cloaking them in a dangerous glamour that neither is capable of resisting. They're hooked. 

Later, in a desperate moment, after everything's gone horribly wrong and they're fleeing a murder rap, Laurie offers to save Bart by going off on her own and never seeing him again, but Bart won't let her. “We go together, Laurie," he says. "I don't know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together."  

They are, of course, doomed; neither will get out of the film alive.

It’s easy to see why Bart was impressed by Laurie's act. She effortlessly shoots targets on the far side of the stage, nailing them every time. She shoots right-handed and left-handed, she grips the pistol upside-down, she bends over and shoots between her legs. Then her assistant enters the act, with a balloon held between her teeth. When Laurie nonchalantly bursts it with a bullet, the assistant produces a stick of chalk, which Laurie shoots right out of her hand:

 
The assistant then holds a second stick of chalk only a few inches above her head:

 
Finally, the assistant holds a stick of chalk in her mouth, so the bullet must hit just a couple of inches away from her face:

 
It’s incredibly skilful, of course. But, for all the undoubted talent of the shooter, isn’t the really remarkable person the one who is brave enough to perform at the other end of the gun barrel? Laurie's pistol is only a .22, but even a small calibre bullet would make a mess of the delicate meat and bone of someone’s head, a fact that must occupy the assistant's mind as she waits for the trigger to be pulled. Apparently, the mafia favoured .22s for hits because, when fired into someone’s head, the bullet wouldn’t come out the other side but would ricochet around inside the skull, shredding the brain. It must take a lot of guts to stand there knowing you might be just a second away from something like that.

Naturally, you’d expect that the actress playing the assistant was in no such danger, but you’d be wrong -- those were real bullets⁽¹⁾. The woman is Boots Morphy, one half of a trick sharpshooting team, and the person shooting at her -- standing off camera, to the left of Annie Laurie Starr in the wide shots -- is Lew Morphy, her partner and husband.

Lew had been a trick sharpshooter for more than 20 years⁽²⁾. He'd been making a living with his guns since long before he and Boots had met: he was 16 years older than her, and seems to have entered show business young. He'd started out in vaudeville, calling himself the Cheyenne Sharpshooter and appearing on bills that included singing cowboy troupes like Jack Pierce and his Oklahomans. He was obsessed with guns, just like Bart Tare. Over the years, he developed an act that involved shooting "chalk, cigarettes and candles from the mouths of pretty girls", one of whom, eventually, was a very pretty girl who went by the tough-sounding nickname of Boots. They married, and together they toured rodeos, fairs and carnivals performing, presumably, the exact display that so impresses Bart in Gun Crazy.

Did Boots get together with Lew before she became his assistant, or did they meet through the sharpshooting act? Whatever the case, it's tempting to imagine that their first meeting was as thrillingly charged with danger and passion as the first scene between Bart Tare and Annie Laurie Starr. Who knows? Maybe it was; that might be just how it goes if, the first time you meet someone you're attracted to, you're looking at them down the barrel of a gun. (Although it's not like Lew married every girl he aimed his pistol at.)

Boots and Lew also performed stunts in movies⁽³⁾. There’s no record of Boots’s stunt parts, but her small stature -- she was less than 5 ft tall -- would have got her work as a stand-in for child actors as well as actresses. We know that Lew stood in for people like Pat Buttram in Gene Autry's pictures, and that he also got a lot of work as an extra in western movies, usually as one of a crowd of townsmen. Here he is in Stagecoach Buckaroo (1942), holding Johnny Mack Brown's left arm:

And in this still from Mystery Man (1944), he's the one standing up:

Lew seems to have been serious about his film work, if the amount of roles he took is anything to go by. But for Boots, risking her life on stage and in the movies was just a sideline, something she did when she wasn’t pursuing her real passion, which was risking her life at sea. Here she is behind the wheel of the hydroplane, Miss Shooting Star, which carried her to victory in racing tournaments up and down the west coast:

Boots was perhaps the most successful female outboard racer in the 1940s and 1950s, winning dozens of championship titles in her long career⁽⁴⁾. Lew raced and won titles too, but he used a more conventional speedboat, which meant that he and Boots never had to compete against each other. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine them doing so when, in every aspect of their lives, they seem to have been such a complementary pair, one of those couples that operates as a tight, exclusive team. For instance, rather touchingly, when naming their children, it seems that they could think of no finer names than each other’s. (The girl was given Boots’s real name, Valerie, but that still means that there would have been a pair of juniors in the house. What would they have done if they’d had a third child?) 

All of which makes this headline pretty depressing:     

⁽⁵⁾

Boots and Lew might have appeared to be an ideal couple, and everyone certainly seems to have assumed that they were, but, by 1958, when she was 37 and he was 54, things hadn't been going well for some time. They’d had trouble with money, and Lew had been depressed over the death of his mother. Moreover, Boots had arranged for her share of the couple’s property in Tennessee to be made over to her alone, and she didn't plan to return to California with Lew after their next annual trip to Dayton, where they owned a holiday resort. She'd talked things over with neighbours and her family, but she hadn't told her husband. Everyone knew Lew had a tremendous temper.  

In the early hours of November 7, 1958, Boots was in her kitchen with her parents, Martin and Sophia Rosinski. I imagine that she'd called them to the house because she was scared of Lew. We know that Lew and Boots were fighting, but it isn’t clear how it all started. It's possible that she'd told Lew that she was planning to leave and he'd lost that temper of his, but we can't be sure. Had they been discussing their problems all evening, with Lew slowly growing angrier and angrier until he boiled over, or did Lew perhaps arrive home late and fly into a rage when he stumbled upon Boots and her parents apparently conspiring to end his marriage and break up his home?

Lew couldn't imagine a life without Boots. Just like Bart and Laurie, they went together like guns and ammunition; each would be useless without the other, as far as he was concerned. When it became clear that Boots didn't agree and was going to leave him, Lew muttered "I'll put a stop to this," and went to get a gun.

Boots ran to the bedroom, and Mrs Rosinski grappled with Lew in the living room. He had a gun in his hand, but he didn't use it on her. He didn't want to kill her; she died by accident when he shoved her out of his way and she fell and split her skull open on a coffee table. Lew probably didn't even notice what he'd done.

He went to the bedroom, where he shot Boots in the head. The gun, incidentally, was a .22, the same calibre as they used on stage; Boots would have died instantly, her brain torn to shreds by the bullet. 

As Mr Rosinski picked up his dead wife and placed her on the sofa, Lew called his friend, an assistant director and producer called Raoul Pagel. “I’ve lost everything,” he said. Pagel said that that wasn’t true, but Lew told him, “Yes I have. I killed Boots, in front of mom’s picture.” Pagel tried to keep his friend talking on the phone, but Lew hung up, went back into the bedroom and put a bullet in his own head.

What Lew did isn't unique, or even that uncommon. That year alone, at least 17 other American husbands had the same idea, from a magazine publisher in the first week of January, who shot his wife and himself in the back of a New York taxi, to a man in Florida on Christmas eve, who killed his wife while she was wrapping presents by the tree and then shot himself in front of their teenage children.⁽⁶⁾ All of the men had in common with Lew not only the fact that their wives wanted to leave them but also the tragically stupid notion that the best way to stop that happening would be to end both their lives. 

If that isn't gun crazy, I don't know what is. 

Sources: Lew Morphy was mentioned to me by Fabián Cepeda, of the Spanish-language website Hollywood Clasico, who described him as "a bit western player and a serious troubledoer who had a sad ending". Fabián also supplied the two pictures of Lew.

(1)The Cedar Rapids Gazette, June 5, 1949; (2)All biographical information on Lew is from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Nov 7, 1958; (3)Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach), Jul 24, 1955; (4)Picture from the Long Beach Press-Telegram, June 13, 1953, information on Boots's racing career from same paper, Aug 7, 1950 and Sep 9. 1956; (5)Long Beach Press-Telegram, Nov 7, 1958; (6)On January 3rd, former Confidential Magazine editor Howard Rushmore shot his wife and himself - see The Coshocton Tribune, Jan 4, 1958. On Dec 24, Ed Harris shot his wife and himself - see The Star-News (Pasadena), 25 Dec 1958. The other murder-suicide reports can be found in the following papers from 1958, on the front page, unless otherwise noted: The Hammond Times (IN), Jan 2 - page B-3; The Derrick (Oil City, PA) Feb 4; Indiana Evening Gazette, Jan 13; The Ada Evening News (OK), April 7; The Morning Herald (Hagerstown), April 16; Titusville Herald, April 18; Journal-Tribute (Marysville), April 30 - p2; The Odessa American, June 13 - p21; Long Beach Press-Telegram, July 7; The Terre-Haute Star, Sep 20 - p23; The Pharos-Tribune (Logansport, IN) Nov 19 - p9; The Daily Messenger, (Canandaigua, NY) Nov 4 - p5;  Logansport Press, Oct 13; Globe-Gazette (Mason City) Nov 5 - p2. 

Comments

[Lance Moody]

Another spectacular job! Thanks. Lance

[Diarmid]

Thanks, Lance. I do my best...

[Graeme]

Can we get a cheery one next? Good work as always my friend.

[Diarmid]

Thanks, Graeme. Next up should be a story about a pickpocket and all-round bad 'un who became a reformed character through the redemptive power of bit-part roles. (I believe his wife died rather tragically, though, but I might go soft on that aspect...)

[johnny]

i think you run one of the most interesting websites around.

[Diarmid]

Thanks for saying so, Johnny. I appreciate it.