May 15

SATURDAY EVENING POST – PART 3

Once signed, Rogers sat around for a few months doing nothing.  Then he sang a song in a dust-storm picture “Under Western Stars.”  The dust-storm sequence was shot on one of the windiest days that California had ever had.  “We had wind machines along, but no wind machine could have equalled what Nature dished up,” said Rogers. “It blew a truck over on its side, and it picked up gravel and dirt and flung them at us until they cut our faces.”  The phenomenal windiness blew the picture into a nomination by the trade journals for the Best Western of the Year.

Roy eyed the crapshooters still clustered around the blanket. “An investment firm, handles my business affairs,” he said. “They also handle the investments of a number of other stars. They allow me twelve and a half a week for spending money. They give my wife fifty dollars a week with which to buy the groceries and things for the kids. They also take care of our household bills.”

His clothing bill is annually around $10,000. His work clothes are made from the finest wool gabardine or sturdy whipcord (these fabrics were still in good condition 50 years later while on display at Dad’s museum) in specially dyed hues ranging from bright yellows and golden browns to electric blues and snowy whites. For the most part, his shirts are brightly embroidered.  He rides a saddle valued at $1,800.  From all his activities, he earns around $200,000. This includes his income from a song-publishing firm, records and a thriving chicken farm business (that was housed at my grandparents place in Van Nuys and Gramps ran it).

I mentioned the fact that Westerns seemed to conform to a highly formalized pattern–as formalized as a burlesque routine or a Dorothy Dix social procedure. Roy thought it was important to abide by the rules of the game. “They tried to put me into a newspaper picture once,” he remarked. “I was supposed to play one of those Pulitzer Prize winners, a character who smoked and drank and kissed dames. You know the type. I put my foot down. I know what my public would think of that kind of goings-on for me.”

He admitted that Westerns tend to fall into the same rigid pattern.  “The heavy is always trying to get the ranch , oil well or mine belonging to the girl or the girl’s bed-ridden dad,” he said. “The hero always helps her. But Republic has got a new idea for the picture I’m working in now. In the picture, I’m playing myself.  According to the script for “Bells of Rosarita”, I’m out on location making a picture when I run into a girl who needs help to keep from being gypped out of the ranch her pappy had left her.  I send out a call for help to Bill Elliott, Don (Red) Barry, Allan Lane, Robert Livingston and Sunset Carson–all of whom work for Republic and star in Western pictures of their own.  Together, we clean up the evildoers and get the ranch back for the girl.  It’s a kind of “Grand Hotel” on saddles.”  Roy described the mopping up of the villains by saying, “We had to ration the crooks. We were allowed one-apiece.”

Bill Elliott, Robert Livingston, Don “Red” Barry, Roy Rogers, Allan Lane, John Wayne

Although Roy didn’t mention it, the problem of casting six cowboy stars in a single picture presented a puzzle in diplomacy.  Just who should ride where and behind whom or in front of whom were matters that had to be adjusted with a jeweler’s-scale delicacy.  In the end, protocol was ironed out amicably enough, but according to the studio, the matter of priority on billings for each one of the six stars’ horses was a complex problem.  The director, producer and assistant director were munching nerve-settling pills like popcorn before they solved things and parceled out the screen credits for the various steeds to the satisfaction of their owners.

Rogers was called for another shot and I was left with his trainer, Glenn Randall, and the company make-up man. Talking to them added to my collection of Rogers lore and Triggeriana.  Republic, it seems, has engaged in a campaign to accomplish what they call “getting Roy Rogers recognized and into better theaters–the kind that ordinarily don’t show Westerns.”  In addition to his regular eight pictures a year, in which he is surrounded by the same cast of supporting players, including heroine Dale Evans and character actor Gabby Hayes, Rogers is being worked into other pictures of a non-Western variety on a guest artist basis.  So far he has appeared briefly in “Hollywood Canteen” (where he sang “Don’t Fence Me In”), then “Lake Placid Serenade” and a picture called “Brazil.”  “The chances are that more people will see him in a year’s time in this way than they will see a star like Greer Garson,” Republic says happily.

That his public is vast and loyal is borne out by the fact that for two consecutive years he has been voted the industry’s No. 1 Western Star by the “Showmen’s Trade Review” poll.  in an overall poll of actors, he is ranked No. 5, being topped only by Betty Grable, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy.  During his last trip to New York, representatives of 700 Roy Rogers Fan Clubs made expeditions to see him.  Members of those clubs came from as far away as Chicago, Maine and Maryland.  In addition to his bobby-sox and male high school following, Rogers appeals to elderly folk, to whom he represents the sterling qualities of a son or grandson they would delight to call their own.  Also, and this is unusual for a cowboy star, he appeals to a sizable number of the sex who are also moved by Charles Boyer’s voice and Ronald Colman’s lifted eyebrow.  He can count upon still a fourth class of fans, quite a lot of his mail is from servicemen to whom he represents home, “America,” and adventure of the peacetime, romantic kind.

I will post the final part of the article next week.

 

May 08

Saturday Evening Post, June 9, 1945 – Part 2

To continue the Saturday Evening Post article written by Pete Martin.

I hope I don’t confuse you with the different fonts and colors. I put the part the PR Department provided Mr. Martin in this regular print. The part that Mr. Martin wrote himself in italics, the part that Dad is quoted as saying in BOLD and my comments in blue print.

I recognized Iverson’s Ranch when I arrived in the high, cool hills within an easy auto ride of Hollywood. I had been there a hundred times before. Only I had made those trips sitting in the dusk of innumerable movie houses, this was the first time I had really been there. Hundreds of movies have been shot there since 1914 when the Iverson’s first got the idea of hiring their place out as a ready-made background for motion pictures. Last year they rented their ranch for the making of seventy movies. Sometimes two companies work there at once. But most of the films made at Iverson’s are “shootin’ gallery” ones. Nature has done a favor for the Iverson’s that most ranchers would regard as a catastrophe. She has grown a fine, healthy crop of rocks for them–some as big as houses. There are rocks with caves gouged out of them, rocks that dwarf a posse as it goes pounding past, its breath hot on the necks of a band of rustlers. The movie companies sign an agreement with the owners of the ranch to the effect that, if the Iverson’s so desire, any structures erected for a film must remain when the filming is over. As a result, the place is literally sprinkled with corrals, log cabins and whole Western cowtowns with Silver Dollar saloons, Last Chance cafes, barbershops and general stores, all of them backless and open to the breeze.

I walked past a group in shirts piped with yellow, baby blue, red and white. Their owners were pleading with a pair of dice which they were tossing upon a blanket. Looking at them, I realized that there was something my tutor in Western movies hadn’t told me. Obviously, in order to be in Western pictures, it was necessary to have hips slim as a snake’s. Cowboy hats, shirts and boots that cost fifty dollars; trousers a hundred and fifty a pair. But even the most expensive pair of trousers can’t make a movie cowboy of you if your rear-end is built along the generous lines of a sofa pillow. Even Gabby Hayes, the bearded, sixty-year-old character actor who appears in all of Rogers’ pictures, has hips an Olympic track star would envy.

I found the lunch wagon and introduced myself to the director, who offered to find Roy for me. I had been warned that, though Rogers was pleasant company, he didn’t like to talk about himself. Presently, the director came back. Beside him was a trim, medium-sized cowboy wearing tightly fitting, superbly tailored, pin-striped trousers. His hips were so narrow that , in comparison, his shoulders seemed startlingly broad. He shook hands and said, “How’s for some breakfast?” “What did you have?” I asked. He looked at me quizzically, “I had an onion sandwich and some Java,” he said. I drew a deep breath and said, “Make mine the same.” When I got it, the sandwich seemed all onion and a couple of yards wide. Tears spurted from my eyes. Watching me eat, Roy had another one. Together, we stood munching. He swallowed and said, “Well, it’s a lot better than hawk, anyhow.” I asked him, “What about hawk?” And he told me about it.

As he talked, I forgot he wasn’t supposed to be easy to talk to about himself. I didn’t remember it until I was leaving. Then I made a mental note always to eat an onion sandwich with a cowboy star. Its potent juices seem to loosen their tongues. There was quite a lot leading up to the “hawk” part of Roy’s story.

He was born in 1912 (actually he was born in 1911) in Cincinnati. When Roy was seven, his parents moved to an Ohio community called Duck Run. “My father worked in a shoe factory in Portsmouth, thirteen miles away, but I didn’t wear any shoes at all until I was about grown,” Roy said. “The bottoms of my feet were like elephant hide.” The first horse Roy ever rode was a plow horse, but his youthful movie idol was Tom Mix, which fixation helped him beat down a prosaic adolescent desire to be a dentist. He purchased a second-hand guitar–he calls it a “gittah”–from a pawnshop and learned to play it with the help of a correspondence course. (My Gramps and all of Dad’s three sisters played the Mandolin. Dad, and all three of his sisters, had played a mandolin since they were little kids. Don’t think Dad ever took a correspondence course, ever. But, sometimes he would go along with the PR department too. )

In 1929 he was able to sell an elderly relative (actually it was his father and he was not elderly, just out of work due to the Depression) on the notion that a man past his prime would need help in driving west. After picking peaches near Tulare, California, in the “Grapes of Wrath” belt and spending time spurring a gravel truck over highways, he helped organize a cowboy band called The International Cowboys. They weren’t cowboys and they weren’t internationals, and the singing cowboy business was some-what spavined and bogged to the hocks at the time. No whit discouraged, Roy helped  organize another band called The Rocky Mountaineers (Those of you who have read my books, know that The Rocky Mountaineers was actually the first band that Dad worked with and they were already a band before he joined them. Then he joined Benny Nawahi and His International Cowboys. Dad left that group and a new one was formed “Cactus “Mac” and the O-Bar-O Cowboys that featured Dad [Leonard Slye], Tim Spencer and a couple of other musicians)  and, when an agent arranged bookings for them through Arizona and New Mexico (they were booked all the way to Texas), they accepted without looking into the project too closely. “What about this “hawk” business?” I asked.“I’m coming to it,” he said.

“We took took off in a beat-up old jalopy, and the famine set in,” Rogers said. Everything except musical instruments was pawned to buy gas and get blowout patches. (Things were soooo bad that Cactus Mac left the group in Hollbrook, AZ, shortly after they set out.) Mostly the group lived sketchily on the pies and cakes which they told their audiences wistfully that they would trade “request numbers” for. “We rode around various towns in the jalopy, hollerin’ out the good news of our arrival to the population through megaphones,” Roy remembered. “But we still weren’t able to lay up a dime. I borrowed a rifle and shells and killed a couple of cottontails. There was a hawk on a telephone wire a hundred and fifty yards away. I had one bullet left. I allowed two feet for the drop and drilled it. When we cooked it, it was so tough we couldn’t get the fork into the gravy. That’s what I mean when I said an onion sandwich is better than hawk.”

The four “cowboys” arrived in Roswell, New Mexico with fifty cents in their Levis and no further bookings in sight (the bookings were there, they just had no money for gas). Roy went to the manager of the local radio station and made a deal for the group to exchange songs for their auto-court bill. But that didn’t solve their food problem, and they continued to remember their fondness for homemade food–especially pies–over the air.  One day a pretty, brown-eyed girl drove up, carrying two whole lemon pies covered with meringue inches thick (Dad later married that brown-eyed girl).  After the Roswell experience the group broke up and returned to Los Angeles. (They actually continued on to Texas, where Tim met his future wife, Velma.) Rogers then spent a year on a ranch in Montana, where he learned at first hand the things he had been singing about–branding, roping, roundups.  He must have given the job intensive study for Yakima Canut, dean of rodeo prize winning bronco busters, said that Roy can ride with any man he ever saw in a saddle, and shoot with marksmen anywhere.  There was a period of being a guide for tourists vacationing at the Grand Canyon, doubling in the evening as an entertainer for the guests at the lodges). (I put that last bit in a different color because Dad never did any of it!!! This was completely made-up by the studio’s PR Department!)

When he had saved enough for a few weeks’ coffee and cakes, he went back to Los Angeles to ride the radio ranges once more. Meeting a few pals, he formed a cowboy band known as the Sons of the Pioneers, which now appears in all his pictures. They made a recording of “The Last Roundup” which blitzed the disk market, and they were “in.”  As Rogers was telling me this, an assistant director came around the corner of the lunch wagon and told Roy he was needed to make a scene. “I’ll tell you more about it when I come back,” he promised as he started away.  I walked over to one of the taller rocks, that looked like a giant egg set on end, and watched Roy ride up to the camera with a party of fellow vigilantes, while a buzzer squeaked for quiet. It was the first time I had seen Trigger. His mane and tail were cream-colored and he had four white stockings. His skin rippled in the sun while the light caught and twinkled in the silver trimmings of his saddle and bridle. Roy and the others on horseback looked knowingly at footprints in the muddy edges of a stream, then spurred past the camera.

When the action had been shot twice more from different angles, Roy came back and took up where he had left off. “I was getting my ten-gallon hat cleaned in Glendale one day when a guy came in and told the proprietor, ‘I got to have a screen test tomorrow at Republic, and I need my hat cleaned quick.’ When I overheard this I snatched my guitar and beat it over to the Republic lot. I tried all morning but I couldn’t get past the front door. Finally, at noontime, some people went in and I pretended I was with them. Inside I ran into a friend named Sol Siegel. I told him why I was there. ‘Have you got your guitar with you?’ Sol asked me. It was outside in my car. I ran all the way to the car and all the way back. Then I sang “My Little Lady” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” I’ve been with Republic ever since.”

Look for Part 3 next week.

 

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