Cowboy Stuntman

Cowboy Stuntman: From Olympic Gold to the Silver Screen (2013) is a memoir by Hollywood stuntman and Olympic medalist Dean Smith, writing with the assistance of Mike Cox. It narrates the highlights of Smith’s career in an anecdotal style, focusing on Smith’s time in Hollywood toward the end of the golden age of the Western.

The memoir opens with one of Smith’s most hair-raising stunts for the 1984 Steve Martin movie The Lonely Guy. Smith recalls hanging bodily out of a helicopter as it flies over the Statue of Liberty.

From here, the memoir moves back to Smith’s childhood in Breckenridge, Texas. His mother died when he was a young child and his father succumbed to alcoholism, so he grew up in the care of his grandparents on a ranch that had been in the family since the 1870s. Smith throws in a few family anecdotes, such as the story of the train robber Sam Bass, who once rode up to the ranch to ask Smith’s great-great-grandmother for food.



Smith grew up during the Great Depression, but he was relatively untouched by it as his family could live off their land. As a boy, he worked as a ranch hand, beginning a life-long love affair with horses and the outdoors. On Saturdays, he went into town to watch cowboy movies. Roy Rogers was his hero, and the values and sensibility of the Western genre would also shape Smith for life.

By the age of 14, Smith was winning prizes as a rodeo cowboy. His rodeo career was hampered by his left-handedness, but soon he found something at which he was even more gifted: track running. He graduated high school as a star sprinter, going on to run for the University of Texas, where he also played football.

The peak of Smith’s track career came in 1952 when he made the 100m final at the Helsinki Olympics. Four runners, including Smith, all finished in 10.4 seconds. It took hours for the judges to determine who had won, and in the end, Smith placed fourth. To this day, he contends that he should have been at least third. He also adds that he wasn’t running his best that day in any case. The journey to Finland had taken a toll on his fitness. Smith did take home a gold medal as a member of the 4 x 100m relay team.



After a stint in the Army, Smith was recruited to play football for the Los Angeles Rams. After a few months, the Rams decided to trade him to the Steelers, and Smith quit football for good rather than accept this indignity.

In any case, Smith had had his eye on the movie business for a while. Shortly after coming back from his Army service, a mutual friend had introduced him to James Bumgarner, an aspiring actor who had picked up a few small roles in TV Westerns. Four years later, Smith spotted a photo of Bumgarner—now going by James Garner—on the set of Maverick. He tracked his old acquaintance down, and Garner helped him land a job as a stuntman on the TV Western Cheyenne.

Smith’s background on the ranch and in rodeo made him a natural. Before long he had landed a job on a movie, Quantrill’s Raiders. His first task was to jump a tractor on horseback. Smith also had a knack for making and retaining lifelong friends. His fellow Olympian Bob Mathias introduced Smith to John Wayne, and Smith’s film career took off.



The left-handedness which had hampered his rodeo career helped him now to secure gigs as a stunt double for Dale Robertson and Robert Redford. Smith worked on dozens of big movies, including Rio Bravo, The Undefeated, and The Alamo. Smith takes the reader behind the scenes of these classic Western movies, explaining the technical difficulties involved in pulling off dangerous stunts and complex battle scenes without the help of CGI.

Smith relates many anecdotes about the movie business and the actors with whom he worked. He recalls “fights” with the likes of Kirk Douglas, and the time he pulled on a red wig to double Maureen O’ Hara. He taught Goldie Hawn a Texas accent, and he once had to choose between doubling Robert Redford on The Sundance Kid or doubling John Wayne on True Grit (he chose Wayne). A highlight for Smith was doubling his hero, Roy Rogers, in Rogers’s final movie. Smith lets the reader know that he lost none of his speed while he was working in the movies. On the set of The Alamo, he raced a horse, besting the beast in two of three heats.

Smith tracks the evolution of stunt work. Technical progress is made as audiences demand ever more exciting stunts. Political progress is made as Smith and others band together to form the first stuntmen’s union, protecting themselves from exploitative filming practices that sometimes pushed stuntmen and women to take bigger risks than they wanted.



From time to time, Smith landed a small speaking role, and in 1974, he was the star of Seven Alone, playing Kit Carson. His acting career never took off in the way his stunt career had, however, and meanwhile, the sun was setting on the Western genre. In 1992, he abandoned Hollywood and returned to the ranch on which he grew up, with his fourth wife, Debby, and their son, Finis.

In 2010, Smith attends a screening of The Alamo in San Antonio, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the movie’s release. He realizes with sadness that only four of his colleagues from that movie are still alive. He reflects proudly on the “strong values” and “sense of fair play” Westerns imparted to their young audiences over several generations.