IRON EYES: MY LIFE AS A HOLLYWOOD INDIAN, Iron Eyes Cody, 1982, 290 pp hardcover, Random House,

One of the more enjoyable Hollywood biographies I’ve read in many a day as told by Iron Eyes Cody. Cody is best known for the most famous public service announcement of all time in which, amid a littered landscape, the camera closes in to a lone Indian and a single tear trickling from his right eye.

Iron Eyes appeared in numerous movies from the silent era up to his death. His favorite roles were in Stagecoach, Sitting Bull in which he played Crazy Horse, and A Man Called Horse in which he played a medicine man. Westerns began in the silent era. When sound came in, Westerns created recording problems and A-picture Westerns were abandoned. Instead, the low-budget Poverty Row studios rented some horses, threw together a script, went out to Juarez Rocks north of Los Angeles and filmed a movie to which they often added the sound later.

His early silent movie work included touring with a popular wild west show put together by a movie star. In later years, he also toured an act involving Hopi snake dance rituals with the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus.

In Hollywood, Cody was in charge of hiring Indian extras for the moviemakers in the early years, a job inherited from his dad. Unlike his father, he insisted on authenticity in customs and costuming, leading at one point to a confrontation with tyrannical C.B. DeMille.

Among the stories he tells in this book about the extras he hired was one from the late 1940’s, involving a laborer he found on a WPA ditch-digging crew….former Olympian Jim Thorpe, stripped of his medals because of a short period when he played professional sports. Iron Eyes helped get the famed Indian athlete back in the limelight, sportswriters voted him athlete of the century, and moviemakers planning a movie biography snubbed him by denying any role in the process. While the movie was filmed (and tanked), Iron Eyes organized a traveling football team made up of Indians under Thorpe’s leadership. The Indian athlete was back in his element, training, toughening, dropping weight, and mowing down football players, playing right up until laid low by cancer which Iron Eyes found he’d been battling for six years.

Cody was a close friend of John Wayne whose fans will find interesting new material about the Duke’s career from the beginning. There’s also plenty of information about another close friend, Gary Cooper, anecdotes about callous but ever-charming Errol Flynn (who ill-advisedly challenged Jim Thorpe to a fight in a bar then hired him), Roy Rogers (Cody was talked into featuring his band at the end of a Los Angeles radio show called he and his wife hosted “The Lone Indian”), William Randolph Hearst (Cody was a frequent guest at the Hearst castle), Ward Bond, John Ford, Howard Hughes, Paulette Goddard, and more.

Cody even spends some time on a couple people who often showed up at Gower Gulch, at the intersection of Sunset and Gower Street, the “cultural” center of the Poverty Row studios. Here producers, stuntmen, producers, cowboys looking for work as extras, the occasional name actor, salesmen, hustlers, and other characters hung out.

Among these characters Cody writes about were elderly Wyatt Earp whose most notable trait was his silence on his Tombstone experiences — Cody says he tried to discuss it– and Northfield Raid bank-robber Emmett Dalton (”We jus’ wanted to git our names in the headlines. Like them James Brothers.”) Both of them were used by the movies for their names.

Naturally, Cody throughout discusses his own life and career, starting when he was 13 when he was first hired for a silent Western being filmed on his father’s ranch. From there he found his way to Hollywood where Westerns had a niche in the celluloid market. Cody talks about his drinking and womanizing, and his less-than-smooth courtship of his wife, a leery archeologist named Birdie. There was his later WWII shipyard undercover work where he reported on sabotage and his later friendship with doomed Iwo Jima flag raiser Ira Hayes.

Cody’s autobiography is long out-of-print but worth looking up. Check Amazon and Half.com. Also, investigate Inter Library Loan. Anyone with a taste for Golden Age Hollywood will find this most entertaining.