The long and short of it

After a career spent playing robots, ewoks and a Drew Barrymore stunt double, Felix Silla settles down to life in the local 'burbs

By Newt Briggs

The closest Felix Silla ever came to dying was when he was filming the whitewater rafting scene for Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Silla was in his 40s and was stunt doubling for Short Round, Harrison Ford's 11-year-old sidekick in the film. At 3 feet 11 inches, Silla was actually a little smaller than Short Round, but he looked similar enough as he went plunging into the rapids of the Sacramento River on an inflatable raft. Flanked by the stand-ins for Ford and Kate Capshaw, Silla clung desperately to his tenuous rubber perch--not because he was particularly afraid but because he didn't know how to swim.

"When I got the job I told the guy I couldn't swim," Silla says in a scratchy warble that's half Marlboro Man and half Munchkin. "He just handed me a life vest and said, `Good luck.'"

More specifically, he handed Silla a "Mae West"--an inflatable life preserver named after the buxom Depression-era bombshell. Silla strapped the vest beneath his costume, but when the raft inevitably flipped and he went to yank the cord, nothing happened. "I pulled and pulled and nothing," he says. "The only thing I could see was blue water and the yellow raft on my head." He bobbed and rolled in the downrush for some time--alternately gulping down breaths of air and big mouthfuls of river water. Finally, a large hand fished him out of the chilly river, but not before he said a prayer and cursed the day he'd agreed to play a wisecracking Asian boy.

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In his prime, Silla was the man of 1,000 costumes--the movie star who nobody ever recognized in public. Like Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca, and the guy who played Jason in the Friday the 13th series, Silla was valued more for his shape, size and athleticism than for his face. During 44 years in Hollywood, he played only one significant part without a mask, and that was as the bald Nazi, Litvak, in the 1975 box-office disaster The Black Bird.

The rest of the time, Silla was cast into anonymity--from a baby gorilla in the original Planet of the Apes to Howard the Duck. He played Cousin Itt on "The Addams Family," Lucifer on "Battlestar Galactica" and Twiki on the "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" TV series. In 1982, he wanted to play the extraterrestrial in E.T. but instead donned a wig and stood in for Drew Barrymore in the movie's trick-or-treating scene. The coveted alien role was split between two littler people and a boy with no legs. Afterward, Spielberg held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart and told Silla, "If you were this much shorter, I'd use you for the second E.T."

Spielberg never made the proposed sequel, but the following year, Silla did land a role as an ewok in Return of the Jedi. In the climactic fight scene on Endor, Silla was shot from his ewok hang glider and had to fall 30 feet to a mattress buried in the ground below. It was a comparatively simple task for the 65-pound stuntman, who launched his show business career with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in New York in 1956. For seven years, the Italian immigrant toured with the circus, performing as a clown, tumbler and bareback rider. Eventually, he absconded for the West Coast, where he made a living as the official mascot for Santa Monica's Pacific Ocean Park. Silla earned his first movie credit in 1963, doubling for the youngest son during the hot-air balloon scenes in A Ticklish Affair. Not long after, he met his wife, Sue, and was forever enshrined in TV lore as the original Cousin Itt.

"I called the studio when they made the Addams Family movie a few years ago," Silla says. "They told me, `Thanks for calling. We really want to talk to you.' But they never called back."

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These days, the phone rings all the time at the Silla house--a six-bedroom suburban bungalow near Decatur and Lake Mead boulevards. If someone doesn't grab it on the first ring, the phone's speaker announces the Caller I.D. number in a booming robotic voice that makes everyone in the house cringe. According to Sue, 90 percent of the time it is for Felix--people calling about appearances, people calling about endorsements, people calling with all sorts of crazy schemes. Silla says these informal arrangements rarely pan out, citing a partnership with local hip hop personality "Big Keith" as the latest collaboration to fall apart.

Silla hasn't appeared in a major motion picture for more than a decade. According to him, the market basically dried up for little people after Under the Rainbow--Chevy Chase's subpar Wizard of Oz spoof--flooded the market with tiny talent in the early '80s. Besides, with the notable exception of Mini Me of Austin Powers fame, little people have become a less valuable commodity in the wake of CGI.

"Now, if you're 5 feet tall, they consider you a little person," Silla says, lamenting Peter Jackson's decision not to use little people for the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings series. "I was lucky because I started out at the right time."

Silla was last cast as an emperor penguin in Batman Returns, and it was one of the few roles for which he really appreciated his costume. "That was the first time I ever told the crew to leave me in the suit," he says. "It was warm in the suit." Silla claims the penguin getup was exponentially more comfortable than the rubber and Fiberglas suit he wore as Twiki on "Buck Rogers." The angular silver costume may have given him the freedom to bust a sweet disco move with Col. Deering, but according to Silla, it was always either boiling or freezing--and never at the right time. He actually had one of the five original Twiki suits until six years ago when he sold his to a collector for $15,000. "The guy turned around and sold it for $5,000 more a year later," he says. "The thing was falling apart. It was in pieces."

Silla moved to Las Vegas a little more than a year ago, eager to escape the bustling sprawl of L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. He is just one in a growing list of former celebs--many of them castoffs from forgotten TV programs--who have opted to live out their golden years in Southern Nevada. Last spring, Silla did a signing and appearance at the Mandalay Bay's Reading Room bookstore with former Hollywood starlet Vitina Marcus. Marcus got her break as a showgirl on "The Jackie Gleason Show," but is no doubt best remembered for the two appearances she made on "Lost in Space" as the so-called Green Lady.

"I think there were a lot of boys who became enchanted with the Green Lady when they were very young," says Marcus, who briefly taught acting classes at UNLV. "Now those little boys are 40-year-old men, and they still have that same crush."

In 1969, Marcus and her daughter left Hollywood to join a yoga ashram. Marcus, who now goes by the last name Graham, eventually settled in North Las Vegas, where she dabbles in real estate, homeopathic medicine and UFOs. She still appears at the occasional science-fiction convention, but generally keeps to herself, her pets and the "dark beings" that have covertly intermingled with the human species.

"I couldn't stay in Hollywood," she says. "I'm weird, though. I wanted to get as far away from it as possible."

Perhaps the same desire propelled Silla to his unassuming new home in Las Vegas. By his own admission, he lives a simple life, using his free time to eat steaks at Texas Station and "rake up junk" in his back yard. Although he had to take up the grass and replace it with rock, he still has grape vines, a synthetic putting green and plum and almond trees on his quarter-acre lot. It might be the ideal retired life if he wasn't still providing for his oldest daughter, her three children and his 30-year-old son--all of whom are normal size.

"They don't realize how much it costs to support six or seven people," says Silla, who gets by on savings and a generous pension from the Screen Actors Guild. Just as he says it, one of his granddaughters comes in search of his checkbook. Sue apparently needs it to buy supplies for one of the grandkid's school projects--something about the solar system. Silla sends the girl off with detailed directions, and then shouts, "Good, go spend some more money," to no one in particular.

A few minutes later, he inquires about the time, knowing that he will soon have to pick up his son Michael from his job on Blue Diamond Road. It's a 32-mile trek that Silla makes twice daily in his 1988 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham--a monstrous vehicle that he pilots by means of a complicated system of lifts and extensions. Exactly why his son doesn't drive is unclear, but it seems to be a combined consequence of dangerous Vegas drivers and a general familial lethargy.

It all gets on Silla's nerves--especially when the kids mess with the thermostat--but his neighborhood is quiet and he insists he's satisfied with Vegas overall. He dwells on money a lot--$22,000 for his new kitchen, $1,500 for a gas line to his barbecue, $400 for service on his Caddie--but all he really wants is a few fellow little people to pal around with.

"I haven't found too many little people here," he says. "I really haven't met that many people at all. I'd really just like a few friends to help me relax. Sometimes, I think I've got to get out of this house before I go crazy."