Harvey Parry, Dean of Stunt Men, Dies

Harvey Parry, the diminutive dean of Hollywood stunt men, whose athletic abilities enabled him to walk on the wings of flying airplanes and whose stature permitted him to double in films for Shirley Temple and Mary Pickford, died Wednesday morning at his Sherman Oaks home.

He was 85 and still “doing the easy stuff--getting hit by cars and falling down stairs” at his death.

Parry was a property man at the studios when he discovered that his boxing and high-diving talents (he had been an AAU champion in both sports) could lead to higher-paying opportunities.

“I was making $30 a week as a prop man when I found I could get $1 a foot for a high fall or $35 for wrecking a car,” he told writer Hal Jacques in his later years. “It wasn’t hard to figure out what to do.”

Runaway Horses

He taught Jimmy Cagney and Clark Gable how to fight and became not only their double but their friend. He donned feminine attire and stood in for Temple, Pickford and Carole Lombard, remembering in a 1983 interview with The Times that he impersonated Temple at the reins of a runaway horse team in the 1937 picture “Heidi.”

He also doubled for “all the little guys,” as he described them. Humphrey Bogart, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson.

Parry, at 5-feet-6 and 122 pounds, even became the much larger John Wayne in one picture, where he was filmed at a distance riding a horse up a mountain.

“When I neared the summit, I ducked behind a tree and Wayne rode the rest of the way with the camera zooming in on him,” he related in 1983.

That was the same year, at age 83, he was being slammed against the wall as reporters burst through a make-believe courtroom door after a verdict in a sensational case.

The scene for the gangster spoof, “Johnny Dangerously,” was reshot a dozen times with Parry--portraying a police officer--hitting the wall and then the floor each time.

Pay Worthwhile

The $330 a day made it all worthwhile, said the veteran of thousands of movies and hundreds of television shows over 65 years.

“I gotta pay the rent and to top that off, I’m a newlywed. It takes money to keep a wife happy too.”

The recent inductee into the Hollywood Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame had wed for the third time in November, 1982.

As a youth, Parry had worked as a circus aerialist before joining Mack Sennett in 1919. His last job was this year in the new Robert Blake television series “Hell Town.”

Over the years he kept himself trim with a daily regimen of push-ups, sit-ups and leg lifts followed by a two-mile brisk walk.

Despite all the high dives, the horse falls, the wing-walking, the mock brawls and the wrecked cars, he was only seriously injured twice. The first was when he broke his back doubling for Gable in the 1935 picture, “Call of the Wild,” and the second was in 1962, during the filming of “How the West Was Won,” when he broke 20 bones in his foot.

As his wife, Lavinia, interjected during one of his interviews, “Only good stunt men get old.”