Sonora Carver, whose experiences as a diving-horse rider inspired the new film "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken," was entertaining members of the cast and crew with anecdotes one night when writer-producer Matt Williams came along.
"He said, `Come on, Sonora - you're making these stories up,' " Carver recalled. "I said, `Look, Matt - I'm 86 years old, I've had enough incidents in my life, and I don't have to make up stories.' "Carver chuckled.
"He's the one that was making up the stories. Like Jimmy Durante used to say, `I got a million of 'em.' "
Indeed she does. During a recent telephone interview from New York - she lives in Pleasantville, N.J. - Carver shared tales about everything from her jewelry being stolen by a classmate at a pre-World War I schoolhouse to her father-in-law's falling-out with Buffalo Bill Cody and having her own extraordinary life story turned into an autobiography and now a Disney movie.
But when Carver said Williams was good at making up stories, she knew whereof she spoke. While the basics of "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken" are true - she was a diving-horse girl, she did marry the boss's son, and she did continue diving after losing her eyesight in a diving accident - Carver said many of the details have been either fabricated or so altered that "to me, they're completely unrecognizable."
"He (Williams) just changed things around to suit himself," Carver said. But when she pointed out all the inaccuracies in the script, Williams and his co-writer, Oley Sassone, argued that their version was more dramatic, and Carver ultimately had to agree.
"I read it again and thought, well, if you don't know this Sonora Carver, you've never heard of her, you've never heard of diving horses - it isn't factually or technically true, but it would make a good picture."
For the record, Carver, who is now 87, was born Sonora Webster, an 11th-generation descendant of a Webster who came to America on the Mayflower - not on the first, famed 1620 voyage but 10 years later.
"I'm very proud of my Webster lineage," she said, adding that on her mother's side, she's a seventh-generation American.
In the film, she and her sister Arnette are portrayed as orphans sent to live with an uncaring aunt, from whom Sonora runs away at age 15 to avoid being sent to an orphanage. In real life, she was not an orphan and was raised by her parents.
As in the film, she did hear of W.F. Carver and his diving-horse act through a newspaper ad - but she was 20, not 15, and didn't have to run away. (Her sister Arnette, however, did join the show at age 15.)
Her romance with Carver's son Al also took a while to blossom.
"Actually, I knew not too much about Al. He (W.F. Carver) had five horses, and he usually kept two with him and Al would take two out to fill other contracts, and the fifth went out with a third man."
Sonora remembers the senior Carver as a colorful character who had ridden the Plains in his youth, became a champion marksman and joined forces with Cody to produce the first Wild West show, in Omaha in 1885.
"They remained partners for a year, but, as you may know, Buffalo Bill was quite an alcoholic," Carver said. "Daddy Carver didn't call him an alcoholic; he called him a drunkard. He (Carver) was a teetotaler; he didn't drink."
W.F. Carver was inspired to create the diving-horse act by an incident in his youth, when he was courting a woman who lived on the other side of the Platte River. To see her, he had to ride across a crude bridge, and as a joke, some of his friends loosened the planks on the bridge so that when Carver returned home, he and his horse went crashing through to the water below.
After splitting with Cody, Carver recreated that scene in a couple of plays he produced, having a horse crash through a trap door to a tank below.
"He got to noticing that some of the horses didn't mind doing it two or three times a night, but other horses would absolutely refuse to do it after the first time."
Eventually, Carver created the carnival act that became a boardwalk fixture in Atlantic City, N.J. At first, the horses dove alone; the girls were added later.
The technical inaccuracy in the film has to do with the way the diving girls mounted the platform from which they jumped on the horses' backs just before the dive. In the movie, they climbed a ladder; in actuality, they ran up the same ramp the horses did.
In real life, Sonora's diving accident - her retinas became detached when she hit the water with her eyes open - happened when she was 27 and had been with the show seven years, not after only a year or so as in the film.
Even after her retirement, Al and Sonora continued to run the show until his failing health made touring impossible. In 1949, they settled in New Orleans, where Al died in 1960.