Ranch Mad Ladd

Hollywood is the land of the movie star and the fabulous salary, the home of glamor and the seat of wealth. To the rest of the world Hollywood life is all play with just enough work around to keep a man from growing stale. However, in actuality, it is the land of the high income tax, and it would surprise you to know the number of high salaried stars and executives who must have a sideline to protect them from the poorhouse in the days of their eventual retirement.

Take, for instance, the case of Alan Ladd and his famous ranch. It has been written about to a great extent and photographs of it have been printed in all sorts of magazines. A good many of the accounts of this “hobby” of Alan Ladd’s have been pretty factual, but they all have neglected one important point. The Alan Ladd ranch is the family sideline, the venture they hope will one day keep them out of the poor house, if something should go wrong with the movie business. Or for some reason Alan should want to retire.

She’s a dilly of a filly; the first foal to be bred on the Ladd’s horse ranch. They’ raise thoroughbred stock for racing, with crops and cattle breeding on the side.

It must be admitted that ALSULANA ACRES, the name of the Ladd farm, began as a sort of a dream. Ever since Alan started in pictures, he had lived a quiet life in the city. He would sit at home in the evenings, and talk to Sue of one day being able to look out of their window at rolling hills, the likes of which they had seen on insurance company calendars. They both liked to ride and owned a couple of horses, which they rode on Sunday afternoons on the trails around the Los Angeles hills. At the first of each month, when the bills for the caring and feeding of these horses came in, they would soberly decide they must get rid of the animals as an unnecessary expense. This, of course, was in 1945 when Alan’s income was nothing compared to what it is today. The solution to the Ladd’s problem came quite by accident.

Alan Ladd is a real friendly character. Off screen he’s as helpful as your next door neighbor who comes over on Saturday afternoon to give a hand in raking up the leaves. So one day when a friend of his, an antique dealer in Beverly Hills, asked him if he would come along on a ride 45 miles up into the country and help unload a desk he had to deliver, Alan obligingly jumped into the truck.

The boss gives morning instructions to his right hand man. Everybody works on the Ladd ranch. Alan does the big jobs; David and his sister have pint-size chores.

When they arrived at the country estate, Alan and his friend lugged the desk into the house. The lady of the establishment, presuming that Alan was an assistant truck driver, asked him to wait outside in the yard while she concluded her business with the antique dealer. Alan walked around the grounds for a few minutes, breathed the fresh clean air, took a good look at the rolling hills and decided this was the life for him. Spotting a “For Sale” sign at some distance down the road, he walked over and took a look at the place. It was an abandoned ranch. There had been a house a number of years before, but it had burned to the ground and the stone foundations were almost entirely buried by dust and debris. There was a series of rickety stables set into the side of a hill and, except for a lone man tinkering with a decrepit windmill, not a creature in sight.

The ranch boasts pigs, too. Alan figures when he’s too old to bring home the bacon it might as well be there waiting for him—in his own backyard.

It was either Alan’s good fortune or misfortune. to approach the man and get into a conversation. At any rate, 15 minutes later, as he sat in the right hand seat of the truck headed back toward Hollywood, he owned an abandoned ranch with a burned down house and a half-a-dozen rickety stables set into the side of a hill.

Breaking the news to Sue was something of an ordeal, as Alan admits.

“I didn’t know what to tell her,” he said. “But on the ride home I suddenly had an idea. I not only would stable my two horses on my new property, I would buy more and raise lots of horses. I remembered reading in the paper that L. B. Mayer had made millions breeding blooded racing stock. And at the annual California yearling sales, bright prospects for handicap purses sold for as much as $100,000. I thought this ranch was the business that was going to give me security when I got too old to work in pictures.”

“Remember, be gentle but firm.” Daddy gives careful instructions to Alana and David before their daily morning ride. Both are fine horsemen.

Sue Ladd is not as hasty in decisions or conclusions as Alan. As a matter of fact, she was quite horrified when she learned that Alan had committed himself to buy the property without a good deal more investigation into the value of the land and the horse-raising business. However, there’d been a handshake on the deal, and they were stuck with it, so they set about trying to make a success of their new enterprise.

The development of the ALSULANA ACRES was a long, dreary process. In the initial fervor of acquiring the place, Alan hadn’t given a thought to water or electricity. There was a well, but the windmill which pumped it must have been the one that had had a tiff with Don Quixote, for it was in a miserable state of disrepair. Alan spent days climbing the rigging, adjusting the vanes, cleansing the pipe, filtering water, and doing a thousand other mechanical chores. Finally, he had sufficient water flowing into a small cement reservoir to supply drink for the few head of horses they had immediately purchased, and to irrigate some of the grazing land. He learned that it would cost him a fortune to get electric power into the site, but there was nothing he could do about it. And the scope of the farm terrified him.

The Ladds converted the-old stables bit by bit into a handsome ranch-house which includes this kitchen, the center of their bustling family life.

“I never realized,” he said, “how big an area 25 acres was until I had to water and farm it. I used to lie in bed at night and dream it was bigger than Texas.”

The first year, of course, was the hardest. The stables had to be converted into a home. This was done one two-stall compartment at a time. The compartments were thoroughly cleaned, new board flooring was put in, the rooms fumigated and painted, decorated tastefully, and furnished in a homely motif. Then another one went through the routine, until it became possible for the Ladds to take their family to the ranch on week-ends and give the kids a little exercise while they worked. The living room was formerly the quarters assigned to the storing of tack and equipment. A flagstone extension was added on the front which gave the room a semblance of size, and if you have seen the pictures of this room, you know that it was decorated beautifully like an Early American country farm house. The Ladds found it necessary to build another small extension onto the main room for kitchen equipment. They installed stoves, and icebox and sink in this section.

This isn’t labor trouble, it’s fun. Good friends like Bill Demarest helped Alan fix up the place. He’s turned a run-down farm, a ruined house, and crumbling stables into a show place.

There were many amusing incidents relative to the development of the Ladd ranch. For instance, there was the time that Alan, begging his business manager for more pipe to be used in irrigation, was told the investment couldn’t be made at that time. But a short while later, at Christmas, a big truck drove up to the ranch loaded with iron pipe, a huge red ribbon tied around it and a pretty card bearing the inscription: “Merry Christmas to Alan from Sue.” He says it was one of the nicest Christmas presents he ever got.

Then there was the present of the blooded mare, which Sue presented her husband on Father’s Day—purchased, of course, out of the ALSULANA Retirement Fund.

Sue had the mare brought out to the ranch shortly after they took it over. The animal was in foal and was to be the first forebear of a long line of Ladd-bred race horses. Alan was so delighted with his prize, that when he and Sue decided to go for a ride across the country that evening, he suggested they take the beast along, led by a halter. Things went beautifully until they were seven or eight miles away from home, at which time the mare bolted, snapped the halter, and took off like Seabiscuit into the gathering dusk. Alan spurred his horse and went after the animal like a regular cowboy. Sue, of little use in this situation, returned to the ranch to wait for him. At four o’clock the next morning, after six solid hours in the saddle, Alan came home admitting that he was not the greatest horse herder in the world after dark. Sue set about giving him something to eat, only to learn that both the water and electricity had failed. They sat in their darkened converted stable in the flickering light of a small candle bemoaning the fate of amateur ranchers.

“If anyone had come along right then,” Alan said, “he could have bought the whole outfit for a two bit piece with a hole in it.”

It was no great comfort to either of them when they learned the next morning that Alan had, without knowing it, herded the horse into an enclosed pasture, and that he had been chasing it around in this confine for the better part of the night.

The same animal was also responsible for another sleepless night at the Ladd ranch without warning, and at a very inconvenient hour, the mare decided to present her new owners with their first filly. There was no telephone on the property and the birth appeared to be so imminent that Alan decided there was no time to go looking for a vet. Fate appointed him an equine obstetrician.

“It was the funniest thing you ever saw,” said Sue. “Alan was a combination horse doctor and father, and he ran around like a demented person trying to see that the foal came along all right and looking for sympathy from me.”

Actually there was more to it than that. The mare was the basis of their breeding stock, had cost them a pretty penny, and could have put them firmly in the red at the outset, if anything had gone wrong.

Alan got himself into quite a situation with Warner Brothers—his new bosses, by the way, during the early days of building the ranch. He was leveling ground, using bulldozers and tractors, when a Warner company began shooting outdoor scenes for Stallion Road right across from his property. Shortly after the shooting started, a production manager from the movie troupe walked over to Alan’s property and asked him if he would mind shutting off the tractors and the other gasoline equipment. Alan informed him that it would be impossible. The men and equipment were costing him a pretty penny an hour and he couldn’t afford to shut them down just so somebody could make an old movie. The man left, but in a little while he came back with the producer and director of the picture.

“See here, Alan,” they said, “you’re in the picture business. You know what our problem is. We can’t shoot with all that racket going on.”

“I know,” said Alan, “but right now you’re talking to Alan Ladd, rancher and racehorse breeder, and I just can’t shut down my work with all these men here at your convenience. Why don’t you come back and shoot some day when we’re doing something quiet, like hoeing?”

It was all worked out amicably, though, The studio installed a series of flagmen between the camera and Alan’s foreman, and when a scene was about to be shot, the flagmen would signal one another by lowering their pennants, and Alan and his crew would stand quietly by until the scene was finished. The studio had agreed to pay Alan for the time his men were forced to be idle. So an impartial party kept track of the minutes on a stop watch.

“It didn’t do much good, though,” said Alan. “I think I got about six bucks.”

Another amusing incident was the gift to the ALSULANA organization of a deep freeze by a friend who admired the Ladds’ spunk. Alan set the box up on a cement platform, tickled pink at the idea he had got something for nothing. The first rainfall, however, proved to him that it Was necessary to put a roof over the box, which he did. And then a wind came up. This necessitated the erection of walls, and before Alan got through, the “house” to shelter his gift icebox had cost him more than if he had bought the thing himself.

It would be nice to say at this point that the almost six years the Ladds have put into the ALSULANA ACRES have been prosperous and profitable—but that is not true. One of the reasons is that some of the horses Alan and Sue have produced haven’t run as fast as they were supposed to. Another is that people just don’t seem to be spending much more than $150 for thoroughbred yearlings, whereas breeding fees, veterinary assistance, and feed cost more than that before the horse is a few months old. However, the Ladds are in so deep now that it would be impossible for them to get out without ing a serious loss and, oddly enough, they are still convinced that the ranch will pay off. At the moment they are concentrating on the raising of a small herd of Black Angus cattle and are installing good-sized structures to be used as chicken coops so that they can go into the egg and poultry business.

A typical day on the ranchland goes like this:

Alan, Sue and the kids leave home about five o’clock in the morning, and drive 45 miles to the ranch. They are greeted by Sturge, their foreman, who has their activities outlined for them. The whole family, including Sue and the kids, get into dungarees and set to work feeding chickens and gathering eggs. When this is completed, they go into the barn where the eggs are sorted, washed and crated, and placed on a truck to be shipped to the market. After a hasty lunch, the gang pitches in for mending fences, stringing wire, repairing the considerable electrical and gasoline gadgets used on the land. Then comes feeding time for the chickens, hogs, cattle and horses and after that dinner. While it is still light, Alan and Sturge go up on a small hill, where they are building a workmen’s house with their own hands, and labor until they feel it is time to go to bed.

There are moments of fun, however, at ALSULANA ACRES. There is the fresh air and the clean smells and the knowledge that they are working in their own earth. There is the sense of accomplishing something from personal toil. There are the happy, friendly gabfests around the fire at night, when everyone is relaxed and yawning. There are the quick dips in the irrigation reservoir, when the family plays like kids at a new swimming hole. And there are the moments at sunset when Alan and Sue stand in their own doorway and look across their fields with their arms around one another and Alan kisses Sue on the cheek and says:

“Honey, you sorry I delivered that desk?”

And Sue looks up at him and thinks of all the fun it has been and says:

“No, darling. I’ve never been sorry for a minute.”

THE END

—BY RICHARD DEXTER

(Alan Ladd’s latest film is Shane—Ed.)

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1952