Excerpt:
"I played the Indian who jumped from my horse to the horse pulling the coach. The director wanted a shot of me coming off the hillside prior to that shot. So he said come as fast as you can. It was fall, and the hillside grass was all dead. ... So here I come just as fast as Hondo could run, and in a blink of an eye, I was sailing through the air. He had stepped in a gopher hole and broke his leg. And I looked back and I could see he was trying to get up. So I went back and ... I held him down.
"We were way out in the country. ... They said if you don't get a vet out here and verify that he had a broken leg, then you can't collect the insurance on him. And I said, it's going to take two hours to get a vet out here. I don't want that horse to lay there suffering. Get me a gun. So anyway, we wound up shooting him, and don't tell me a big man don't cry."
Here's an excerpt from his book Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life:
High speed played a part in the Smokey and the Bandit movies, as did Jackie Gleason (Sheriff Buford T. Justice), but to the day he died I don't think he ever knew my name. When things were hunky-dory, he called me "Pally," and when he was unhappy, it was "Mr. Director." While I was preparing to shoot the first Smokey, Jackie called and said he had a few questions about the movie and wondered if I could come over to his hotel to discuss things. An hour later I rang his doorbell, wondering how this was going to work out. The Jackie Gleason we all knew answered the door dressed in slacks and a sports jacket with a red carnation in the lapel. I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. Invited in, I took a seat, and we made small talk for a few minutes. Then I told him I had been working all day and sure could use a drink. He apologized, and we moved to the bar. He fixed the drinks, and we toasted to a good shoot. I told him how much I'd enjoyed watching him on The Honeymooners. I think he had a story about every episode, and we drank a toast to each one. That's a lot of episodes.
Finally I told Jackie I had to get up early for the first day of shooting. As I headed for the door he said, "Now, don't you be late." I promised I wouldn't and said goodnight. On the way back to my hotel, I wondered what he'd wanted to talk to me about, because not one word had been said about Smoke. The next morning I arrived on the set and found Jackie sitting in his chair, legs crossed, wearing the same clothes as the night before. He might not have taken his clothes off, but he had removed his shoes, because now they were on the wrong feet. As I approached he said, "Hi, Pally," raised his coffee in a salute, and tipped over backward. He got up laughing and said it was time for him to get dressed and made up. As I got to know him better, I learned that all he wanted was some company and a drinking partner...
Fun.
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