LYDEN : He Was Villain and Able

Pierce Lyden knew what was coming.

The more than 600 western film fans gathered on the lawn of the high school here last weekend to see a celebrity panel discussion gave Gregory Peck a standing ovation and clapped and cheered for Roy Rogers’ former leading lady Penny Edwards and veteran stuntman Loren Janes.

Then it was Lyden’s turn to be introduced.

A chorus of boos and hisses greeted the former B-western badman who made a living menacing the likes of Gene Autry, Wild Bill Elliott and Lash LaRue.

Lyden, who had traveled 250 miles from his home in Orange to this tiny town on the eastern slope of the Sierra, perhaps for the last time, wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“They do that everywhere I go,” Lyden, 89, said afterward. “They’re still the kids that used to throw paper wads at me on screen and shoot off cap pistols at me and hiss and boo when I came on and cheer when I’d lose in a fight.

“They remember all that and they’re just tickled to death to meet me. . . . I just never expected to be remembered.”

In Lone Pine, they never forget.

At least not in October during the annual Lone Pine Film Festival, a three-day salute to the films shot on location in the hills behind town. Since 1920, when silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle filmed “The Roundup” here, the enormous boulders and rock outcroppings at the foot of Mt. Whitney have provided a rugged backdrop for more than 500 feature films and TV shows.

“Gunga Din,” “High Sierra” and “Lives of a Bengal Lancer” were filmed in Lone Pine, but mostly they made westerns here.

“Pierce Lyden started up here in Lone Pine in 1937 in a Hopalong Cassidy picture,” said Dave Holland, director of the 8-year-old festival. “He played just a ton of bad guys in his career and did them well--to the point that now when we see him, we love him for doing what he did: making the hero look good.”

Lone Pine and other western film festivals around the country have given Lyden the recognition he never received during his 30-year Hollywood career.

Since he began appearing on the festival circuit in 1980, he has been honored with a Pierce Lyden Film Festival in Liberty, N.C., and served as grand marshal of the festival parade in Lone Pine. He also received a Golden Boot Award (“the cowboy Oscar”) and a star on the Walk of Stars in Palm Springs. And, in 1995, he made his first trip to England, as the only American guest of honor at a B-western festival in Birmingham.

In June, Nebraska Gov. Ben Nelson gave Lyden, a native Cornhusker, the Buffalo Bill Award “for outstanding contributions to quality family entertainment in the Cody tradition” during Nebraska Land Days in North Platte.

Past recipients include Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Gene Autry and Iron Eyes Cody.

“I felt very honored--an old badman--getting it,” said Lyden, who delayed having surgery for skin cancer so he could attend the ceremony. (“I sunbathed a lot because I didn’t like to wear makeup,” he explained.)

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In September, Lyden made his fifth guest appearance at the Sonora Film Festival in Northern California.

But after 17 years of attending as many as seven western film festivals a year, the man billed as the oldest living badman to have appeared in more than 100 B westerns plans to hang up his trademark black Stetson.

“I’ve got to slow down,” said Lyden, whose wife, Hazel, died three years ago. “I’m coming up on 90 years old in January, and it’s getting a little hard to go alone very far. So I’m going to finish up all these festivals this year, and that should wind it up for me.”

This year’s Lone Pine gathering featured a salute to Republic Pictures, best known for turning out B westerns and serials. Among the other Republic alumnae who appeared on the panel Saturday were former leading ladies Ann Rutherford, Ruth Terry, Vera Raltson and Peggy Stewart.

Gregory Peck never worked at Republic, but he made three Westerns on location in Lone Pine: “The Gunfighter,” “Yellow Sky” and “How the West Was Won.”

Lyden had a small part in “The Gunfighter.”

“I don’t know whether I even got billing on that,” he said, “but I had a couple of days, and it was wonderful to watch Gregory Peck work. I was just a working actor and I was always in awe of stars. And, of course, it was wonderful to be at 20th Century Fox.” To get away from the cheap studios on Poverty Row, he said, “was a great thrill.”

“But it never worked out to anything better.”

Lyden’s movie career was like that.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1932 at 24, after six years acting in stock companies in the Midwest and New England.

He landed bit parts at MGM, driving cars and shooting Tommy guns in gangster pictures.

“I thought I could stay in the background doing stunts and then some day I’d get a break as an actor,” he said.

But the big break never came.

“Like I always say, I found out there was one Clark Gable and they didn’t need two,” he said.

Lyden, who grew up riding horses on a ranch in western Nebraska, started doing westerns.

“You went around and got your own work in those days. The casting office was sitting on the street and you just went to see what they had. In those days you got $10 or $15 a day. That’s all. A lot of days, you got $5 a day if you worked out of Gower Gulch, the corner of Sunset and Gower. They’d come out and pick out the cowboys every morning, put you on a bus and take you to to Iverson [movie location] Ranch. You were lucky if they paid you $5 and a sack lunch.”

Lyden appeared in so many westerns that he was typecast, first as a cowboy and then as a badman.

“I couldn’t get anything else. It worked out as a good living, anyway. And I found out it was a blessing to be a badman.”

Unlike leading men, he said, “badmen can go on forever.”

As one of about 85 actors who worked regularly as bad guys in B westerns, he was shot, hanged, dragged behind a horse, run over by cattle and hit with an arrow. He was never seriously hurt, though.

In all, Lyden appeared in about 350 films and television shows--about 150 of them were westerns, and, with only a few exceptions, the movies were B pictures. Doing the “TVs,” as he calls the television westerns that replaced the B westerns in the 1950s, soured him on the business.

“We did those ‘Cisco Kids,’ three of them in a week,” he recalled.

The pay for the TV westerns was poor, he said, and he’d often be asked to do stunts for free. “It just wasn’t any fun any more.”

After retiring from pictures in 1962, Lyden began a new career as a stagehand in Los Angeles theaters. He also spent two years manning spotlights at Disneyland and worked as property master for Shipstad & Johnson’s Ice Follies before settling into retirement in Orange in 1973.

Lyden thought his Hollywood past was behind him until he accepted his first invitation to a western film festival in 1980.

“The fans wanted him--the people who put on the festivals,” actress Peggy Stewart said in the high school classroom where the guest celebrities had gathered before the panel discussion Saturday. By the early ‘80s, Stewart said, many of the well-known badmen had died, “which heightened Pierce’s popularity” at the festivals.

As Lyden sat in a folding chair a few feet away talking quietly to Gregory Peck, Stewart recalled that she first met Lyden at Republic Studios in 1942.

“If you ever went on the back lot of Republic and Pierce wasn’t there, something was missing,” she said, adding that she’s “thrilled” that Lyden, “one of my favorite people,” has received recognition for his work in films.

As Stewart said, in the hierarchy of B westerns, “it ran: horse, cowboy, sidekick, the girl and the baddie.”

As the celebrities began filing out of the room to begin the panel discussion, Lyden was asked what he had said to Peck.

“I told him I was in ‘The Gunfighter’ with him and that I was just an old heavy man, a badman. And he said, ‘I really liked the bad guys. They always had the best parts.’ ”

The last of the old badmen couldn’t help but smile.

“Quite a compliment from a star,” he said.