At Pyramid Lake

Seven: Pyramid Lake, Mustangers,and The Misfits

168 The place of Pyramid Lake in reporter A. J. Liebling’s 1954 New Yorker articles , “The Mustang Buzzers,” and playwright Arthur Miller’s 1957 Esquire short story and 1960 novel and film script, “The Misfits,” is, like the lake, both transparent and opaque. Liebling is quite clear about the origins of his story about two cowboys and a pilot who round up wild horses and sell them for pet food. He met the trio at Drackert’s guest ranch in 1953. Liebling’s three caballeros are Hugh Marchbanks, a Jack Mormon cowboy; Bill Garaventa, a local rancher who flies a Piper Cub; and Levi Frazier, a Pyramid Lake Paiute and champion roper. (Basil Woon claimed that Marchbanks had simplified his name from Marjoribanks, a prominent English family.) Miller gives his wranglers fictional names: Gay Langland, Guido Racanelli, and Perce Howland. In his autobiography Miller identifies Langland as a cowboy named Will Bingham, but leaves the inspirations for the other two mustangers unnamed. Guido, based on his ethnicity and role as pilot, is obviously Garaventa. Perce is obviously not based on Levi Frazier. Liebling has his wife deliver some of the lines about cruelty to animals that Miller gives to the character Roslyn. In Liebling’s story the roundup captures six horses—two stallions, a mare, and three yearlings; Miller ’s herd consists of a stallion, three mares, and a colt. Liebling and his cowboys find their paltry catch funny, for Miller and his “misfits’” five horses are pitiful and tragic. Miller’s story involves numerous American myths: freedom on the western frontier, salvation through love, and the importance of work in defining self. Both stories are about the meaning of place. The deeper influences of the lake and its surroundings on Liebling and Miller, however, remain opaque. This chapter attempts to bring some clarity. Because Miller’s version of the mustangers’ story is better known and more complex, I begin with him. With the first production of Death of a Salesman in 1949, Arthur Miller became America’s leading playwright. At his death in 2005, he was one of the most eminent literary figures writing in English. In 1956 he divorced his first wife to marry Marilyn Monroe, who had emerged as “America’s Pyramid Lake, Mustangers, and The Misfits s e v e n � � Pyramid Lake, Mustangers, and the “The Misfits” 169 sex goddess,” an actress whose persona was more important than her performances . Their unlikely union was both celebrated and derided in the media as a version of “Beauty and the Beast.” Their marriage lasted less than five years, and by 1962 Monroe was dead. Married to Monroe and living in England, Miller wrote a short story, “The Misfits,” about three men hunting wild horses, called mustangs, to capture and sell for pet food. A version appeared in Esquire in October 1957, with a longer rendering published in 1967 in a collection of stories, I Don’t Need You Anymore. According to Miller, the story was based on a chance meeting with some cowboys while Miller was residing at Pyramid Lake for six weeks in order to obtain a divorce. Thirty years later in his autobiography, Timebends: A Life, he recalled the mustang hunters, “whose intact sense of life’s sacredness suggests a meaning for existence.” Miller’s own beliefs had been shaken by the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations and the nuclear threats posed by the Cold War. He was moved to write “a story about the indifference I had been feeling not only in Nevada but in the world now. We were being stunned by our powerlessness to control our lives, and Nevada was simply the perfection of our common loss.” Miller’s life had continued out of control as Marilyn’s drug addictions worsened, and the couple separated. In 1959 producer Frank E. Taylor interested John Huston in directing a movie version of “The Misfits.” Miller seized the chance to rewrite the story as a gift to his wife, enlarging the character of Roslyn, a divorcée who accompanies the cowboys on their roundup. He worked with Huston on the shooting scripts and expanded his story into a novel. Clark Gable, rising young star Montgomery Clift, and durable character actor Eli Wallach were cast as the three mustangers. Thelma Ritter, a respected character actress, played Roslyn’s middle-aged friend Isabelle. Filmed in the small town of Dayton, Nevada, in Reno, and at Pyramid Lake (the tribal council received a “donation” from the...