Walt's Family & Friends Interview with Robert Stack Film and television actor Robert Stack was a young man in the early 1930s; a time when Walt was riding high thanks to Mickey Mouse and the "Silly Symphonies." Although Stack wasn't a close personal friend of Walt, he did have the opportunity to play polo with and against him. Following are excerpts from an interview with the performer, who passed on in 2003. His memories of that time don't only help to shed some light on Walt's polo career -- they also provide some rare insights into life in Hollywood at the time. Q. You knew a lot of the famous men and women of Hollywood when you were rather young, didn't you? Q. The attraction was social also, wasn't it? Q. Walt belonged to the Riviera Polo Club, can you describe it? Q. Was Walt a presence in the sport? Q. How competitive were the games? Were they taken seriously? Q. Did Walt have about 19 horses? Q. Why did these rich, famous men choose polo over other sports? Q. You knew a lot of the famous men and women of Hollywood when you were rather young, didn't you? Stack: I grew up around these people in show business as a kid without thinking anything special about them. I met most of them through sports. Mother didn't want me to grow up in a house full of women. She had my grandfather take me out to a thing called a skeet field, and that's where I met everybody: Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Bob Taylor. This, you must remember, is the macho time of film. This is when the man tried to simulate, in a sense, the characters they played on film. And they were athletes. They jumped into things they weren't really equipped to do, like polo, which was a very, very difficult game. In fact, two of them were killed in one year. But there was a kind of a pastiche that went with, at that time, being an actor. And I think they tried to legitimize themselves by doing these sort of fancy sports, if you will, and polo was one of them. Q. The attraction was social also, wasn't it? Stack: They would have these tailgate parties with the wicker baskets and the champagne and the caviar and the whole song and dance, which was not really typical of the way Hollywood was at all. I was a little young at the time to be into the martinis and stuff, but players would go over to the Polo Lounge I guess and it was a very social kind of a time then. I don't mean pretension so much, but it was honestly, it was kind of wanting to go back to the old country, you know. There was kind of a pastiche to polo. Kind of a, "Yeah, man, I play polo." And we had a lot of fun together and Walt was a very important part of it. Jimmy Gleason -- people don't even remember who he was but if you ever saw "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" -- he was a wonderful actor. Not Jackie, but Jimmy. Snowy Baker was sort of the honcho at Riviera. He used to be a wrestler, and he had terrible horses. And when you tried to go past him on your horse, he used to call it the Snowy Baker elbow -- and he would stick his elbow out and if you went past him, you'd pull yourself up off of your horse. So, not too many people got past him. It was a wonderful time. It reminds me of Carole Lombard, when she said, "It's like a club. It's like being invited to be a member of a club." She meant the motion picture business. And it was. It was kind of an inside group, and they all sort of knew each other -- and it was much more fun, I think, than now. Q. Walt belonged to the Riviera Polo Club, can you describe it? Stack: The Riviera adjoined the golf course and there were three or four polo fields and we all had stables there, and the Whitneys and everybody else, it was a very posh place to be. There's a picture of Spencer Tracy and me when I was 16 years old that came out in the paper, and he had a duplicate picture on his dressing room table in his dressing room. Q. Was Walt a presence in the sport? Stack: Yeah, Walt was a good polo player -- and he loved the game -- and we had little 8 goal teams -- and they took the combined number of goals that you had to make. A 12 goal could be either a 3 or 4 goal man or it could be a 6 goal man and a combination thereof. And I have a couple of trophies at home with Walt's name on them. We hadn't won the world's championships but we had an awful lot of fun. Q. How competitive were the games? Were they taken seriously? Stack: Oh, yes, yes. Any time the Argentineans would come in they would bring their horses with them. The reason they came, most of these great polo players came was to sell the horses and make a lot of money which they did. You could see some of them red-hots in our profession, and I think Walt was among them, bidding these fantastic sums for these magnificent horses. Because in polo, whether you know it or not, if you can't get to the ball, you can't hit it. So the guy with the best horse usually wins. Q. Did Walt have about 19 horses? Stack: You have to do that. You have to have a lot of horses because if you play a lot, they get damaged a bit and they get tired. You should have a minimum of 6 -- and it's an expensive game. It's not something you step into and say, it's going to cost me 15 cents. There's a camaraderie but there's also a terrific danger to it. Q. Why did these rich, famous men choose polo over other sports? Stack: Again, it has a panache to it -- it has a kind of a style. When the wife says, "And my husband plays polo" -- people say, what? -- plays polo? Wow, gee. It connotes that you're successful -- subtext: you perhaps have money. Oh, yeah, of course we have a stable. We have 12 horses. It's a throwaway, you know. Socially, I think this was a good part of it. Polo kind of gave them a false social status -- perhaps that, because the actors in motion pictures were trying to get a certain measure of legitimacy. Even Lawrence Olivier said, "Acting is an honorable profession. It should be treated as such."