In the 1990s, we were living in Tesuque, New Mexico, a few miles from Santa Fe and not far from the famed hide-away resort, Rancho Encantado. Our house sat at the end of a dirt road that ran along the top of of a long, high mesa that offered wide-open views of piñon-covered hills and distant mountain ranges. A half-dozen sand-colored homes were scattered through the trees, and Gene Hackman's spacious adobe estate was about 750 feet from us. Ali MacGraw lived just across from the Hackmans- quite a star-studded road for a quiet little area out in the pinon woods.
I was a member of the Santa Fe Polocrosse Team at the time, and one afternoon I was out exercising my polocrosse horse. We were trotting along the dusty road when a big black SUV with dark tinted windows pulled up beside me and stopped. For a moment I wasn’t sure what to expect—cars don’t usually stop out there without a reason—but then the window rolled down, and there was Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy.
He introduced himself and Betsy to me, and we chatted for a few minutes, him leaning over the SUV's console to see me out the passenger-side window, me leaning down to see him better from up on my buckskin horse, and Betsy in between. I was impressed that Gene made a point of telling me that Betsy was a classical pianist and was from Hawaii. Then he complimented me about my horse, Cisco, and mentioned he’d also ridden a buckskin in the film Bite the Bullet—which, I told him, was one of my favorite movies because it was about a guy who took very good care of his horse during an arduous cross-country race, even when under immense pressure to do otherwise.
Gene was being friendly and I’d seen him ride in plenty of westerns, so I told him that Cisco was just one of my two horses, and asked if he’d like to go riding with me sometime.
He grinned that 'Hackman grin' and said, “Elaine, I don’t get on a horse for less than a million dollars.”
I laughed and said, “Well, I guess we won’t be riding together anytime soon, then.”
So it turned out that Gene Hackman wasn’t quite the horselover he'd played on screen—but he was a nice neighbor, and I'd had a fun 'Gene Hackman moment' that still makes me smile.
