A Western Star Is Fading Fast

It’s the plumbing that tends to stick in the minds of visitors to Santa Clarita’s William S. Hart Museum, not the fact that it was the home of one of the most famous cowboys in silent films, said administrator Janis Ashley.

“They’re very impressed that we have seven bathrooms in the house,” she said with a laugh. “Forget that we have an outstanding art collection.”

Helping visitors see the man behind the bathrooms is only one of the challenges faced by Ashley and her sole staffer. The William S. Hart house is the museum nobody seems to know, despite its administrative ties to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park.

The larger problem might be Hart himself and how time can dim even the brightest celebrity. One of the creators of the Western film and, in his day, the most popular screen actor in America, Hart made more than 60 movies, all of them silent.

Pushed off the screen by Tom Mix and other more charismatic cowboys, the long-faced actor saw his stardom crumble like old film stock. Today, only historians and hard-core film and Western buffs have the vaguest idea who the tall, laconic cowboy actor was, Ashley said.

Hart’s diminished profile is reflected in the number of visitors to the hilltop Hart Museum. According to Ashley, 15,000 visit annually. In contrast, the Getty Center averages more than 10,000 visitors a weekend.

Having shot movies in the Santa Clarita Valley, Hart bought land there and built a 22-room house crammed with art and artifacts, including a choice collection of Navajo rugs. The house, which cost $100,000, had features only a star could afford, including a spiral staircase, a built-in food warmer in the dining room and a hallway telephone booth. Paintings by pal Charlie Russell and others hung on the walls, alongside Hart’s saddles and a pair of samurai swords.

Located on San Fernando Road, off the Antelope Valley and Golden State freeways, the house went to the county on Hart’s death in 1946. As he explained in a speech: “While I was making pictures, the people gave me their nickels, dimes and quarters. When I am gone, I want them to have my home.”

“Part of our problem is you can’t see it from the street,” Ashley said. “You have to be sort of ambitious to come to the William S. Hart Museum.”

What Ashley means is that you have to be willing to trudge a third of a mile up a winding road from the parking lot, often in punishing heat, past a sign that warns of rattlesnakes.

In the past, the museum had a van that carried visitors up the hill. It’s in poor condition now, and the museum doesn’t have the money for a driver.

On a recent weekday afternoon, a half-dozen visitors made the trek. Edna Arias of North Hollywood had brought her son, Helbert, 21, and daughter, Natalie, 6. Helbert had been here as a child and remembered Hart’s collection of firearms.

As they walked, the air was tangy with eucalyptus, small creatures rustled in the brush and, at one point, a pastoral vista of the Santa Clarita Valley appeared. They passed eight bison, descendants of buffalo donated by Walt Disney in the 1960s.

Arias said she likes to bring the children here to savor nature.

Michael Mahoney, 49, who works at a dairy in Michigan, was visiting with James and Karen Moran of Lancaster. Before the tour, James Moran stood outside the house savoring its Spanish colonial style.

“I’m drawn to this kind of architecture,” he said. “Aluminum siding, that’s the big thing in Michigan.”

From Classical Actor to ‘Two-Gun Bill’

Ashley, who was a volunteer at the museum for 13 years, rattles off Hart facts and anecdotes. Born in the 1860s in Newburgh, N.Y., Hart was a classical actor before he came West. He made his first Western at 49 and soon became known as “the good-bad man” and “two-gun Bill.”

Ashley points to a picture of Hart, who was 6-foot-2, towering over tiny Mary Pickford, and explains that he was once as celebrated as Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and even Charlie Chaplin.

“He was ridiculously popular,” Ashley said. “People loved him.”

Ashley appreciates Hart’s pivotal role in shaping the idea of the American West.

“William S. Hart was the first cowboy actor to bring authenticity to the Western film,” she said. Real cowboys didn’t wear braid and sequins like Tom Mix and other rhinestone cowboys, and neither did Hart. “A lot of cowboys wore old Civil War uniforms--leftovers.”

Paula Marantz Cohen is an English professor and film historian at Drexel University who wrote about Hart in a new book, “Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth.” She also credits Hart with creating a more authentic Western.

Dust kicked up by galloping horses was one of those touches, Cohen said. Hart was the first Western filmmaker to forgo wetting down the location and shoot the scene dust and all.

When Cohen teaches courses in silent film, Hart is always a hard sell: “His screen persona doesn’t work as well as Douglas Fairbanks’; students can still relate to Fairbanks.” Today’s students also tend to be gaga for Buster Keaton, she said. Hart’s dour, moralistic character lacks widespread appeal, she said, and the movies themselves present a problem. They seem much more dated than, say, those of Chaplin.

Beth Werling is the collections manager at the Natural History Museum, and she is quick to emphasize how important Hart was.

“He was not the first actor to make a Western, but he brought the strongest vision of the West to viewers,” she said. “He was the foremost interpreter of the West as a place that needed to be tamed or civilized by Anglo-Americans.”

Hart brought to the screen the same view of America that Theodore Roosevelt brought to his bully pulpit and that Frederic Remington gave American art galleries, Werling said.

That view repels many contemporary Americans. “It’s very difficult to appreciate a Hart film today,” she said, “because there’s a lot of righteous violence, there’s sexism, there’s racism.” Nonetheless, the good-bad man that Hart created persists in the Western protagonists of Clint Eastwood and others, Werling said.

No Filmmakers Can Use the House

The museum’s fund-raising options are limited by the terms of Hart’s will, Ashley notes. Admission to the museum is free, as is parking, and must remain so. And no one can benefit commercially from the property. That means the museum can’t make extra money the way so many locals do: by renting out the house to filmmakers.

“I’m not sure I’d want them filming in the house. I’ve heard horror stories,” said Ashley. But she’d be happy to see some wealthy benefactor pour money into the institution, as businessman George C. Page did for the museum at the La Brea tar pits named his honor, which is also linked to the Natural History Museum.

Natural History foots the bill for such Hart Museum needs as killing whatever was living in Hart’s 13 buffalo coats. The garments were cleaned, frozen and unfrozen and tucked away in acid-free boxes. The Friends of the William S. Hart Park and Museum spent almost $45,000 last year on projects such as creating a library of Hart movies.

The Natural History Museum also spends $100,000 a year for two full-time educators, including Ashley, according to Ann Muscat, its executive vice president. That money helps provide tours to about 6,000 school children annually and underwrites a program that brought two Hart Museum programs--one on the Chumash Indians, the other on cowboys--into 55 classrooms last year.

Plans Underway to Boost Image

Unlike grander museums, the Hart Museum has an informal air. “Our tours are not set in stone,” said Ashley. “It’s not like Disney, where you get to the hippo and have to [give a predetermined spiel].”

Muscat said the Natural History Museum is working on a master plan to raise the profile of all three branches. One likely change will be the showcasing of its Hollywood collection, which is now open only to scholars. The Hart collection, which includes his business records, is an important part of the Hollywood material, she said.

But Muscat has no illusions that visitors will flock to Santa Clarita, no matter how vividly Hart’s story is told.

“Some people on the Westside,” she said, “perceive Exposition Park as too far to go.”