This article was contributed by Dr. Eva M. Kubicek of Austria. Thank you, Eva!
"IF SOMEBODY WILL JUST SHOOT ME, IT WILL BE A FAVOR."
By Nancy Anderson
From Screenland, September issue, unknown year
Alex Cord wanted to die -- anything, he thought, would be better than the terrible pain that gnawed at him. Someone, something said, "Live," and miraculously he did.
Alex Cord should have been dead -- but he wasn't.
He had ridden Brahmans before that day at Madison Square Garden, always with the heart-stopping knowledge that he might die within seconds. The big bulls with their ungainly humps looked sleepy and placid enough in their pens, but a professional cowboy knew that, with a man on his back, the Brahman became a death-dealing combination of lightning speed and mostrous power dedicated entirely to the destruction of his rider.
But Alex' instinct for survival had always reassured him. Subconsciously, he'd think, "It's not your time to go. Not yet."
But that day, at 21 years of age, with five years of rodeo riding behind him, he was thrown from a charging Brahman and found himself broken in the dirt, the helpless target for tearing horns and cutting hoofs. Even then, his only emotion was one of faint surprise that this could be happening to him.
And then, mercifully, he fainted.
Later, on an emergency room table in a hospital, his tortured body seemingly broken beyond repair, he was surprised to be alive. His injuries were so serious that he knew he should have died. And he began to pray that he would.
"If somebody will just shoot me," he muttered through the fog of pain, "it will be a favor."
Yes, he should be dead, but he wasn't.
Alex with his penchant for doing the impossible, lived. It wasn't easy to fight the darkness, to keep himself from giving in to interminable, sweet sleep. But then, Alex had devoted most of his life to doing things that were either hard or impossible.
When he was 12 years old, he'd forced himself to walk again after a bout with polio which was supposed to have crippled him permanently.
As a child, Alex lived on Long Island, near New York City, but his heart was on the wide-open range. Horses and horsemanship, these were his only interests. When other kids went to Ebbett's Field and came away determined to be baseball players, Alex was indifferent to the challenges of the diamond. It would be all right to hit a home run. Sure. But what he'd really like to do was to ride a horse.
The sight of New York's Finest, proud in their dark blue uniforms, never inspired Alex to be a policeman, unless he were a mounted one, nor did the scream of a hook and ladder charge him with a desire to be a fireman. When he walked on Broadway, he didn't even glance at the theatres.
No. He shared none of the average city boy's ambitions All he ever wanted to do was to ride horses. In his dreams, he saw himself astride a high-spirited charger, the man and the horse imparting strength to each other. It was Alex's vision to live a free, vigorous, outdoor life, carried from adventure to adventure by pounding hoofs.
One day, though, his dream abruptly ended. His body was no longer free but was encased in a vise of pain that held his arms and legs stiff and weighed on his chest until he could hardly breathe.
"Polio," he heard a doctor tell his parents. "And I must be frank. Alex will probably be permanently crippled."
Crippled? Oh, No! Alex's mind rejected the verdict. Why that would mean that he could no longer run or jump or leap astride a horse.
Crippled? Grimly, the child rejected the verdict. He would walk all right, he told himself. He'd walk and run and ride because, otherwise, he just simply couldn't live.
Alex survived polio and, to the amazed satisfaction of his doctor, began to recover from its results. Alex' body was thin but tough, and his spirit was even tougher.
Through sheer determination, rather than through some miracle of medical science, he stretched his stricken muscles and stood without crutches.
He took uneven, uncertain steps and almost cried with joy. Yes. He'd known it! He could walk, and someday his steps would be strong and even again.
Meanwhile, though, Alex' parents were concerned about his health. He looked so pale. So finely drawn.
"He should get out of the city." they told each other. "Fresh air. A more relaxed atmosphere. That is what he needs now to be strong and healthy."
And so the decision was made with Alex' enthusiastic consent. He'd go to a ranch in Wyoming until he was strong again. Nothing could have suited the boy better, because on a ranch they had plenty of horses.
In Wyoming, Alex' childhood dreams came true. There were horses to ride and distances to cover. He attended a rural school, but he much preferred the corral to the classroom, and, whenever he could escape his books he was in the saddle. He still walked with a slight limp, but, so long as he could ride, he didn't really care.
Alex not only rode, he learned roping and bulldogging and all the other Wild West tricks that are necessary to the operation fo a ranch and very showy at a rodeo. And the more skilled he became in the cowhand's arts, the less interest he took in school.
One day, when Alex was 16, he entered a rodeo. The competition was held in connection with Cheyenne Frontier Days and attracted some of the top roping and riding talent.
Alex wasn't even afraid when he walked into the ring to compete in the bareback bronc riding class. He was too young and inexperienced for fear. He was confident he would win.
"I was in for one hell of a surprise. That bronc took three jumps and threw me across the ring."
"That's the last time I ever entered a rodeo when I wasn't afraid," he says. "After that, I was afraid every time."
Nevertheless, Alex retained such confidence in his skill as a cowboy that he didn't go back to school.
Instead, he crisscrossed the West and later the country, riding bareback and saddle broncs and, later, Brahman bulls.
("The first time I rode a bull, I was so scared I couldn't even remember it," he confesses now.)
For a while, his parents didn't even know where he was, so nobody made much of an effort to make him go back to school and, as far as Alex was concerned, formal lessons were something he could do without.
When a boy in his teens is making $15,000 a year in prize money, it's pretty hard for him to believe that algebra and Elizabethan poets are in any way important.
So Alex learned about bronc busting, but not about Hamlet, and, for a while, the arrangement seemed perfectly satisfactory. Of course, there were a few bad days on the rodeo circuit, days when you broke a bone or failed to get the purse. Still, Alex was content with his life until he was 21 years old.
Then came that near-fatal day in Madison Square Garden when he was gored by a Brahman bull . . . and experienced pain such as he thought no man would ever have to endure.
Miraculously, he lived, but recovery was slow. For months he was flat on his back. But he was determined to return to rodeoing when he was discharged from the hospital...and it seemed as if nothing could veer him. Until, one day, someone gave him a copy of Hamlet.
"I had no more idea what it was about than if it had been written in a foreign language," Alex said years later, "but even so, I couldn't put it down. I read it over and over trying to understand it."
Shakespeare. Hamlet. He'd heard the names, of course, but until someone had thrust this tormenting, teasing, red book into his hands he couldn't have said for the life of him whether Hamlet had written Shakespeare or Shakespeare had written Hamlet.
He read and read, his frustration increasing with every sentence until he had gone through the play three times. Then he laid it aside and tried to analyze his feelings.
********************
Here he was, he thought, a grown man, 21 years old, but as ignorant as a child. Oh, sure, he knew about roping and bulldogging and breaking a horse, but when it came to words and ideas -- well, he didn't know anything.
He must have a good mind, Alex reasoned, or he wouldn't respond so greedily. His inner-being hungered for the nourishment of Shakespeare even though he couldn't digest it. And that, Alex knew, was what hurt so much. Like Tantalus, he was famished for treasures that were just beyond his reach. He ached with longing.
Tossing and rolling in his hospital bed, opening and closing the devastating book, Alex reached a conclusion.
"I've spent years," he remembered, "developing my body, but I haven't spent five minutes developing my mind. Not since I was 16. My only salvation is to go back to school. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to finish high school."
Meanwhile, during the eight tedious months that it took his body to mend, he read and read and read. He asked for the books he had heard about and ploughed through them whether they made sense to him or not.
After Hamlet, he tackled Homer's Iliad, and, needless to say, he couldn't understand it. Not at first. But he read it over and over until the heroes of Troy came alive.
"As soon as I'm out of here," he promised himself again, "I will enroll in night school."
So back to school he went, not only to earn his high school diploma but to continue on to college where he expected to earn a degree in English. At this late date, Alex still had no interest in acting.
A woman, however, changed his life.
One night a girl friend suggested they go to a movie and it so happened that the picture playing was Sir Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare's Richard III.
"When I came out of that theatre," Alex recalls, "I knew that I had to be an actor."
More than that, he would settle for nothing less than playing Shakespeare.
So, once again, Alex Cord tackled the almost impossible.
He attended a dramatic school. He decided to take fencing lessons to develop grace and a posture different from that of a free-striding, saddle-oriented, rodeo rider.
But learning to fence and learning to act weren't enough. He had lived in Wyoming so long that, no matter what he was saying, his voice smacked more of the range and the stock chutes than of Stratford-on-Avon.
So Alex also went to work on his speaking voice and he discovered that breaking habits of speech were harder than breaking wild stallions. Still, he succeeded to such a degree that he played Shakespeare, and two years ago in London, while appearing in Play With A Tiger, he was voted the best actor on the West End.
Shortly afterward, Richard Quine met him and tapped him for a dramatic role in Synanon. Although the picture hadn't drawn raves from the critics, Alex did so well that he has been chosen to play Ringo in the remake of Stagecoach, the role that in the original version made John Wayne a star.
Playing The Ringo Kid in Stagecoach is like playing Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind.
The actor appearing in the second version of the famous film has to meet an almost impossible standard. Inevitably, he'll be compared with a super-star in the super-star's most famous role.
But Alex, perhaps with the bravado that took him into his first rodeo competition, isn't worried.
"The picture will be entirely different from the first Stagecoach," he explains. "The way The Ringo Kid was played 30 years ago wouldn't be believable today -- not with today's more sophisticated audiences. Originally, he was such a naive country boy that he was in love with a prostitute and didn't know it. This time he'll know what she is and love her anyway. This way I think he'll be more interesting."
Off-screen, Alex insists he "lives out of a fast car and two suitcases."
Unlike most residents of the Greater Los Angeles, he likes to drive and relaxes best behind a wheel. For kicks, he scouts farm land with the thought of someday buying a ranch.
Sometimes, too, he goes to rodeos and with acute nostalgia watches other young men being trampled in the dust. Almost always, when he sees a rider thrown, there rises from his subconscious the challenging thought, "I'll bet I could have stayed on that horse."
In his softer moments, he courts beautiful Anjanette Comer, a young actress from Texas who looks very much like a young Vivian Leigh, but who has an acting style all her own.
"Anjanette and I get along very well," Alex says laconically.
But Alex is a maverick who hadn't been branded yet, not even by the lovely Miss Comer.
"No," he says after a judicious pause, "I wouldn't say that we go steady. Going steady is for high school students. And being engaged is for -- well, for people who are going to get married.
"Right now, I'm in-between the two."
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