Max Terhune

Max and Elmer, in character for a B-western. Photo: Janet Green, via Find A Grave.

Somewhere in a public restroom, years before Hollywood ever put a horse under him, Max Terhune started making pig noises. Full grunts, dead accurate, and the men around him went scattering, hunting for whoever had smuggled livestock into the building. His own family told that story about him for a reason: he was always cutting up, always making people laugh, and the joke usually cost the other guy about ten seconds of real confusion first.^[1] Pull up a chair, because this one starts on a factory floor, not a stage, and it takes a stranger turn than most.

The toolmaker who left at forty one

Robert Max Terhune was born February 12, 1891, in Franklin, Indiana.^[2] By 1930 he had the kind of life a lot of men his age had: a wife, Maude, a house in Anderson, Indiana, and a day job as a toolmaker at Delco-Remy, the General Motors parts plant. He was thirty nine years old.^[1] The vaudeville stage was something he did on the side and had been for years: a whistler, a juggler, an impressionist, a magician, and a vent working the tail end of variety's run.^[1]

The studio publicity of the day traced his act back to something simpler than any stage school. He learned to mimic animals first, and put that to use once he got in front of a crowd. Ventriloquism came after.^[3] Then two things happened close together: he landed a spot on a radio show with Gene Autry, and in 1932, at forty one, he packed up and left for Hollywood.^[1] Forty one is not the age most men bet everything on a new trade. Terhune did it anyway, and it worked.

Skully becomes Elmer Sneezewood

The figure came before Hollywood did. Terhune had performed for years with a vent figure billed under the name Skully, sometimes Skully Null, going back to his vaudeville days.^[1] The figures themselves were the genuine article: he worked with figures that came off Frank Marshall's bench in Chicago, the same shop that carved the working tools of half the country's vents in that era.^[5] By the time Republic Pictures needed a permanent screen partner for him, the figure had a new name for the marquee, one that stuck for the rest of his career: Elmer Sneezewood.^[4] Movie audiences never learned about Skully at all. They only knew Elmer, riding along in the saddle.

Forty five pictures, two studios, one sidekick

Terhune spent the back half of the 1930s and most of the 1940s as a working cowboy character actor, and Elmer clocked in right alongside him. Republic Pictures put him in twenty one entries of The Three Mesquiteers starting in 1936. Monogram Pictures followed with twenty four more in The Range Busters starting in 1940: forty five feature films across the two series alone, playing a comic sidekick billed first as Lullaby Joslin, later as Alibi.^[4][2] By 1957 the trade count had him past seventy pictures total, counting his many guest spots on television and radio.^[6]

The joke in the writing never changed and audiences never tired of it: characters argued with Elmer, threatened Elmer, and got fooled by Elmer, and the script never once acknowledged that the vent standing next to him was doing the talking.^[7] By his own era's account his last picture was Giant in 1954, though the small parts and the fair dates kept coming for years under his old nickname Alibi.^[7]

Off camera, he never really stopped

The Oracle, the newsletter of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, tracked him for years the way it tracked every working vent in the country, and the picture it gives is a man who could not resist a bit even at his own dinner table. At a restaurant in Louisville, he lit a cigar somebody had handed him and rigged it to blow up in his own face, and the waitress serving the table did what the Oracle called "a neat juggling act and dance" just to keep the dishes off the floor. The same write-up noted that Elmer himself had once been kidnapped and held for ransom, and Terhune paid it to get his partner back, the kind of line that only makes sense in this business.^[8]

He showed up for the conventions too. At the 1953 national gathering of vents and magicians in Cincinnati, he sat down to lunch at Schillings Restaurant and worked the table with close-up card tricks and what the Oracle called "distant voice projection," entertaining the room because that was simply what he did.^[9] Through the 1950s he kept the western persona working even when the cameras weren't rolling: three commercials a week for Dad's Root Beer, weekend shows at Corriganville, the old movie ranch outside Los Angeles, and the Pomona County Fair, which billed itself as the largest in the world. That same year he sent two dollars to the Great Lester memorial fund.^[10] His Root Beer sponsorship on Los Angeles television had already been running since at least 1952.^[11]

Television found new uses for him too. He turned up on I Love Lucy in 1960,^[12] and that same year The Lone Ranger cast a traveling ventriloquist named Boswell, a witness to a murder in the plot, played by, in the Oracle's own words, "our friend 'Alibi' Terhune and his companion."^[13] He was still doing two shows every weekend at Corriganville and school and church exploitation dates for Dad's Root Beer as late as 1960.^[14] And twenty years after The Three Mesquiteers first ran, a television station in Melbourne, Australia dusted off a print and put it back on the air, the westerns reaching further than the men who made them ever expected.^[6]

The magic circle

Terhune's other trade never left him. He came up through vaudeville as much a magician as a ventriloquist, and in August 1941, five years into his movie career, Genii put him on the cover performing under a stage name held over from that earlier act: Hammo the Great.^[2] He held a charter membership in the Hollywood chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, Ring 21, wrote a column for Genii called Max and Skully, carrying his old figure's name into print long after Elmer took over the marquee, and by most accounts card tricks were his particular forte, worked right into his film scenes.^[2] He also traded skills the old-fashioned way: he taught ventriloquism to a young magician named Mysterious Brown, and took magic lessons back in return.^[15]

On location

Max and Elmer in the look that carried them through Republic's and Monogram's B-westerns for the better part of two decades.

Photo via Travalanche

Hammo the Great

Terhune's own magic act made the cover of Genii in August 1941, performing under a stage name held over from his vaudeville days.

Photo via Magicpedia, Genii Magazine

The magician's grip

Elmer working a deck from his usual perch. Card tricks were reportedly Terhune's forte, and he built them right into the act.

Photo via Magicpedia, Genii Magazine

The correspondence

Photos, movie stills, and a signed letter on Range Busters letterhead, six of the photos inscribed to fellow magicians. The lot sold at auction in 2018 for $270.

Photo via Invaluable

The circle

No performer works completely alone. Here is Terhune's world: the maker whose figures he carried, the radio friend who helped point him to Hollywood, the student he traded skills with, and the club that kept his name in the record.

The last reel

Max Terhune died June 5, 1973.^[1][16] He had moved his family to Arizona by 1968, but Sylmar, the California town he called home for years before that, had elected him honorary mayor back in the mid 1960s.^[1] He was survived by his son Robert, who went on to become a stuntman himself, his daughter Maxine, seven grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren.^[1]

Forty five pictures across two studios. A wooden partner who never got billing of his own. And a General Motors toolmaker who decided at forty one that steady was not for him. Not many people get to cash in a bet like that. Max Terhune did.

Forty one years old, a good union job at Delco-Remy, and he traded it for a plank of Frank Marshall's basswood named Elmer. I have known toolmakers with less nerve than that.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy