When It’s ARS GRATIA ARTIS, a Paw Means Nothing
A week before I turned twenty-two, I lost my left arm in a mountaineering accident, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I wouldn’t have said so at the time. A falling rock had crushed my elbow and everything on out. Of course I didn’t lose Janet, too much in love to desert me. I didn’t lose my promised accounting job, because it takes only one hand to ply a decimal keyboard. I lost the dream that possessed me all through college, of acting in the movies. I was the only member of my class with a double major in accounting and drama, and it appeared that the dull, safe half of that major would see me through life.
Fresh from the hospital, I kept an appointment for a casting call; I wanted to say I’d set foot on a studio lot at least once. The director was a young fire-eater named Stanley Kubrick, filling in for someone who had dropped dead on the job. Kubrick was determined to make the movie his own way, and when he saw me, his eyes lit up. Alright, you’ve guessed—-the movie was Spartacus and I was the fellow whose arm got chopped off with a gladius.
It was my big break, though it took time to pay off. They dressed me in Roman Republican period, with a convincing fake arm, and I put in my one day’s work. Then I took up my other life as Tom Kettle, junior associate in a megalithic LA accounting firm. Studios were skittish about graphic violence in those days, and audiences didn’t see my footage until Spartacus was finally restored. But the word still got out, from Kubrick or the people who worked for him: I had something unique to offer Hollywood. I started getting job offers a couple of years later, slowly at first, then in bunches after the Hays Code was lifted.
If you were making a horror movie or a war movie or a disaster movie or an action movie with lots of bystanders hurt, I was your man. I never got a credit, any more than the cartoon voice actors who came before Mel Blanc, but I was in demand. I even picked up a nickname sometime during the seventies: Pawless Kettle.
Here’s a breakdown of the fates suffered by the various fake arms I donned over the years.
Burned off 34
Blown off 29
Cut off 27
Torn off 41
Crushed by falling/flying objects 18 (a statistic I’ll never forget)
Dissolved in acid 6
Eaten 14
Pinched off 2 by giant crayfish
1 by giant crab, organic
2 by giant crab, robotic
I made surprisingly good money for these brief, gory performances. A union with eighty-five percent unemployment imposes a high daily wage. I earned as much acting in one day as I did balancing books in a whole week, more if I had a speaking part—-and screams counted as speech, by SAG rules. The seasonal lull in acting work happily coincided with the tax rush, and preparing 1040s busied me until good shooting weather returned. More than once, directors paid me the compliment of jiggering their shooting schedules to extend past April 15th; the film simply wasn’t in the can unless Pawless Kettle did his bit. Believe me, there’s no flattery like knowing an industry revolves around your availability.
Even in a town where everyone knows people in the movies, it’s considered a privilege to hear insider talk. My neighbors and coworkers knew about my acting, and sharp-eyed clients recognized me from this or that movie; I was happy to share the latest with all of them. Son Broderick asked me to Show and Tell, so I brought along a few fake arms left over from previous films (our storage shed is full of souvenir arms, hanging from ceiling hooks like so many Smithfield hams). I gave a little talk on stunt pyrotechnics, holding up a realistically blackened arm for illustration, and one kid asked:
“Mr. Kettle, what if the fire got out of control?”
“I’d be grateful they weren’t burning up a prosthetic leg.”
The boys in the class were old enough to get the joke and everyone laughed, but that was a foreshadowing of my professional end.
My career has had the usual ups and downs. I was heartbroken when Dustin Hoffman got picked for the live-action remake of Peter Pan; I thought that might be the role to lift me out of the ranks of the bit players. The very next day, my agent signed me for a TV commercial and the client was Prudential. You know which commercial I’m talking about. They did a series of personal injury commercials in a deadpan-slapstick mode, and I was the man on the bus whose arm was ripped off by a sudden stop. The hand kept holding the strap, the elbow stayed crooked, I fell back with no change of expression on my face. The whole series increased Prudential policy sales by a third, but that particular commercial was the standout. It won the Clio—-I thought I looked very dapper at the ceremony, in my specially tailored tuxedo jacket—-and by now it’s had half a million hits on You Tube. I may be prouder of it than of anything else I ever did; every tragedian really wants to do comedy, whether or not he’ll admit it.
That was then. I turned in my SAG card last year, and the jobs stopped coming three years before that. It’s more than a matter of audiences getting more pathos than they asked for when an old man loses his arm. Computer generated effects can do the same thing now for less money, much less when you figure the cost of insurance. I was heavily insured at every shoot, and for good reason. Once an actor repeated the Spartacus stunt and his sword went on through the fake arm to inflict sixty sutures worth of hurt. Another time an explosive in the fake arm drove an unexpectedly jagged plastic shard into my left thigh. The wound felt more serious than it actually was, and for a few seconds I thought I might become the only bit player with one arm and one leg.
Janet and I happened to be on the Walk of Fame last night while going to a new restaurant that offered a seniors’ discount. I got to thinking when I saw the star for John Gilbert, matinee idol with a choirboy’s voice, who was doomed by the coming of the talkies. How many of us are there, John, the ones who know that technology progresses but art never does?
