And they did for the Hollywood stuntman’s attempt to sail off the Golden Gate Bridge on Feb. 6, 1948.Ĭlad in two suits, weighted boots, football padding, another rubber suit and a football helmet that onlookers described as giving him a man-from-Mars look, Rhodes also had three parachutes on his back to ease his fall. Rhodes, who also went by his native Navajo name “Chief Sundown,” was no stranger to danger.
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He had lost two fingers in a knife fight on the set of the movie "Scarface." He once tried to jump off the Aloha Tower in Honolulu only to be thwarted at the last minute by police. The 265-foot plunge off the most famous bridge in the world was right in his wheelhouse, until it wasn’t. “If I make it, I’ll have publicity and be on my way,” Rhodes told a friend who later testified at the coroner’s inquest. Rhodes had been seeking fame all his life, and successfully became one of Hollywood’s first stuntmen, appearing in movies such as "Under Arizona Skies" and "Duel in the Sun," in which he performed a cliff jump.
Rhodes also made the news in 1946 on a radio program called “Truth or Consequences” in which he was bizarrely tasked with living on a traffic island on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea for three weeks. He completed the challenge and won himself a taxi ride to New York.įor his big ticket to stardom, Rhodes was inspired by a circus performer named Frank Cushing who was plucked out of the bay the previous year after claiming that he had just leaped from the bridge, though no one was there to see it.ĭusty thought he could do the same but let everyone see it, and so employed the services of his pal, Hollywood cameraman Jose Guzman, to capture the jump on film. They would split the profits from the film 50/50. Rhodes was estranged from his wife Lorraine, who lived in the East Bay in Port Chicago with their two kids, Rocky, 4, and Oowala, 9, but he made arrangements for her to witness the stunt, maybe in the hope that the feat would win her back. The Pittsburg Sun-Telegraph on May 2, 1948. to San Francisco days before the jump to prepare, and holed up in the Grand Southern Hotel on Mission Street with his cameraman to wait for a clear day so the footage would look beautiful when it was watched on news channels from coast to coast. the following day to hatch a plan to monetize the footage. Rhodes’ press agent, Susan Todd, told reporters that Dusty had painstakingly calculated the speed of his fall, how he would hit the water and other details, as he did when he prepared for his movie stunts.
"This will be the biggest jump of my life," he told her.īut things went wrong for Dusty as he climbed the rails to attempt the feat.
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Maybe in order to evade authorities who had refused permission to allow the jump legally 18 months earlier, he removed the weighted boots that were intended to keep him upright during the plunge.Įven so, bridge foreman Arthur Olson caught up with the stuntman as the crowd gathered, and grabbed him, but lost his grip, only succeeding in ripping free one of the harnesses. This is perhaps why only one of Rhodes' three small parachutes opened, doing nothing to slow him down.Ī jump off the Golden Gate Bridge takes around four seconds, during which a person will reach a speed of 80 mph before smashing into the water's surface like concrete. The chances of surviving are less than 1.5%, and almost zero if the feet don't hit first. As his wife described, without the weighted boots to keep him upright, Rhodes' body arched forward, eventually meeting the water face-first. Horrified spectators screamed and mothers covered their children’s eyes as Chief Sundown’s lifeless body bobbed under the bridge and out to sea. The corpse was pulled from the water by the Coast Guard a mile from the bridge 20 minutes later.
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