Cowboy Cred or: This Ain't My First Rodeo

Well it's bulls and blood

It's dust and mud

It's the roar of a Sunday crowd

It's the white in his kunckles

The gold in the buckle...

It's cowboy hats

It's spurs and latigo

It's the ropes and reins

And the joy and the pain

And they call the thing rodeo

- "Rodeo," written by Larry Bastian, recorded by Garth Brooks

What's wrong with this picture?

(Here's a hint: Notice all the Stetsons crowning the spectators in the background.) We don't follow the rodeo circuit in the Moviehouse, but when a round of channel-surfing called up images from a recent roundup, we were startled by the propagation of helmets worn by the participants. Cowboys in helmets?! Cowboys are supposed to wear...well, you know, cowboy hats!

Cowboys look upon bull-riding as the original extreme sport. A 2009 article in The New York Times stated, "Studies show that trying to cling to the back of a bucking and spinning bull for eight seconds is far more dangerous than playing football or hockey, sports in which helmets are mandatory." One study in particular found that bull riders were ten times more likely to get injured than football or hockey players.

In the early 2000s, professional bull rider Justin Koon took a spill that resulted in a fractured skull and left him in a coma. Almost a decade later, he walked away from a similar head dive with only minor cuts because he had been wearing a protective helmet. Koon's previous frame of mind concerning helmets had been: "I would never put one on because I wanted to look like a cowboy, with my boots, long-sleeved shirt and cowboy hat."

...Vs...

Some riders find the weight of the helmet distracting, others claim their sightline is limited. In an environment that cherishes independence, rodeo veteran Dustin Elliott, who doesn't wear a helmet, maintained, "I still think there's got to be a little bit of cowboy left in this sport. If you're not a little bit scared, you shouldn't be doing it."

Ty Murray, one of the most decorated rodeo cowboys in history who retired from the sport without ever wearing a helmet, said, "It's just a cowboy thing. America, the whole idea of the iconic cowboy wearing a hat."

Well, as long as we've got rodeo clowns, we'll still have the thing they call rodeo. Slim Pickens was an early rodeo clown, after busting broncos and roping steers. As an actor, he was best known for his roles as the drawling bomber pilot Major Kong in "Dr. Strangelove," as Cowboy in "The Getaway," and as conniving villain Hedley Lamarr's henchman Taggart in "Blazing Saddles" (pictured below).

"Where the hell is Major Kong?"

"I've been married for 35 years, same ol' gal.
Man, she's a tough old hide."

"Piss on you! I'm working for Mel Brooks!"

He was born Louis Burton Lindley Jr., and as a teenager, he defied his father's wishes by competing in a rodeo, where he was told his chances of winning the prize money were "slim pickin's." Knowing that his father didn't want to see his name on the entry list, young Louis chose "Slim Pickens" as his name and won $400 that afternoon.

When he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, Slim Pickens noted that his profession was rodeo, which the recruiter misread as radio, assigning him to a military radio station in the Midwest.

During his 20 or so years in the rodeo, Slim Pickens presumed he had broken every bone in his body. "I had one side of my body X-rayed after I got throwed one time, and it showed I had 17 broken bones...But all that rodeo punishment just conditioned me for what I had to put up with later from movie producers."

A lifelong Californian, Pickens somehow adopted an Oklahoma-Texas drawl that impressed filmmakers, and he made his feature film debut in 1950's "Rocky Mountain," a latter-day film in the career of Errol Flynn (pictured below).

Slim Pickens (center, in buckskins) steals a scene in "Rocky
Mountain" from star Errol Flynn (far right, on horseback) and
leading lady Patrice Wymore, whom Flynn married. Wymore,
incidentally, stepped into the role refused by Lauren Bacall,
who thought the part was beneath her talents and who ended
up being suspended by the studio.

Hollywood westerns took advantage of Slim's rodeo skills. Bringing his own hats and boots to his roles, he rode his own horses and mules and never needed a stand-in for horseback shots. He was, as well, one of the only performers in westerns who could handle a six-team stagecoach.

It's a little known fact that Slim Pickens had a kid brother, called, believe it or not, Easy Pickens, whose sole acting credit was a bit part in Sam Peckinpah's 1970 lyrical western "The Ballad of Cable Hogue," featuring Jason Robards and Stella Stevens and costarring Slim.

Later in his rodeo career, Pickens, as mentioned, specialized as a rodeo clown, a sidelight not without perils and risks of its own. In the 1972 rodeo drama "The Honkers," starring James Coburn, Slim got third billing playing a rodeo clown named Clete (pictured below).

For whatever reason, the year 1972 ushered in a glut of rodeo and contemporary cowboy films, none of which featured any star with honest-to-goodness cowboy cred...

Besides starring as an ex-con hoping for reclaimed bulls-and-
blood glory in the dusty arena, Cliff Robertson produced, co-wrote
and directed "J.W. Coop." Larry Mahan, honored in several rodeo
halls of fame, appeared in the film as himself.

"Pocket Money" pitted honest 20th-century cowpoke Paul Newman
against crooked rancher Lee Marvin in a get-rich-quick scheme. 

Born in the small town of Laurel, Nebraska, and raised in Compton,
California, James Coburn could still conjure up a western drawl
when called upon. "The Honkers," which also featured the above-
mentioned Slim Pickens as a rodeo clown and multiple rodeo hall-
of-famer Larry Mahan, was co-written and directed by Steve Ihnat,
a busy character actor who had played Coburn's foe, a traitorous
general, in the 1967 spy spoof "In Like Flint."

Director Sam Peckinpah's elegiac modern-day western, "Junior
Bonner," cast Steve MvQueen, a roving street thug in his youth in
Indianapolis and Los Angeles, as a veteran rodeo rider who returns
to his Arizona hometown to reconcile with his alienated brother and
estranged parents. Academy Award-winning actor Ben Johnson,
like Slim Pickens a real-life rodeo cowboy-turned-actor, costars.

The year 1972 wound down with "When the Legends Die," with
Richard Widmark as the booze-soaked mentor of a young Ute
Indian entering the rodeo circuit. The rebellious Native American
was portrayed by Frederic Forrest, best known for his roles in
Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" and "Apocalypse
Now," as well as his portrayal of the bloodthirsty Mexican-
Indian Blue Duck in the classic miniseries "Lonesome Dove."

Before saddling up with the genuine articles, like Slim Pickens, Ben Johnson, and their ilk, we wanted to poke around the A-list of Hollywood western stars to see what kind of genuine saddle sores they brought to their roles. First and foremost, of course, is the movie star who always demanded he rode the tallest horse - John Wayne. The Duke played football for USC until he lost his scholarship as a result of a bodysurfing accident. Wayne did not dislike horses, but he rarely rode them off film sets, and, given his druthers, he always preferred sailing his famed yacht, "Wild Goose" (pictured below).

Henry Fonda studied journalism at the University of Minnesota before starting his acting career at Nebraska's Omaha Community Playhouse. In what would be his final film, 1981's "On Golden Pond," which garnered him his only Oscar as Best Actor, Fonda, as the infirm Norman Thayer, listens to his steadfast wife, Ethel (played, in an Academy Award-winning performance, by Katharine Hepburn) deliver her "knight in shining armor" speech that culminates with, "You're gonna get back up on that horse and I'm gonna be right behind you...and away we're gonna go, go, go." He responds, "I don't like horses," which largely summed up Fonda the actor's opinion about horses.

He would ride them if he had to but preferred
scenes that circumvented the necessity.

Speaking of Henry Fonda and horses, in a literal cliffhanger of a scene from the fanciful 1939 biopic "Jesse James," following the calamitous attempt to rob the bank in Northfield, Minnesota, Jesse (Tyrone Power) and brother Frank (Henry Fonda) are pursued by a relentless posse when they force their horses off a bluff into a lake. The shot of a single stuntman and the hapless horse was filmed from two different angles, to be spliced together as if to show both brothers' plunges. The fall didn't kill the horse; what did was its panic after the jump which caused the animal to drown.

As a result, the Motion Picture Association of America agreed to allow the American Humane Association to oversee the treatment of animals in movies from that point on, leading to the oft-seen disclaimer stating, "No animals were harmed..."

James Stewart was a New York stage actor who worked on model airplanes and dreamed of being a pilot. As the first major Hollywood star to don a military uniform in World War II, he enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army and ended up a brigadier general in the U.S. Army Air Forces.

In what must be considered a singular feat in motion pictures, James Stewart rode the same horse, Pie, in 17 westerns over a period of 22 years. When the horse was literally on its last legs, during the shooting of "The Cheyenne Social Club," a 1970 western comedy directed by Gene Kelly that found Stewart and Henry Fonda as saddle tramps who inherit a Wyoming brothel, Fonda, an innately talented artist, painted a portrait of Stewart's beloved mount which became a treasured keepsake for the actor (pictured below).

Randolph Scott - immortalized in the reverential dictum, "You'd do it for Randolph Scott!" in "Blazing Saddles" - worked as an accountant in a textile firm that employed his father before getting bitten by the acting bug. From the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, Scott and close friend Cary Grant shared a beach house in Malibu that came to be known as "Bachelor Hall" (pictured below).

Clint Eastwood was a lifeguard for the U.S. Army at Monterey Bay's Fort Ord during the Korean War before landing studio contract bit parts in "Revenge of the Creature" (pictured below), "Lady Godiva," "Tarantula," and "The First Traveling Saleslady."

All right, buckaroos, the time has come to cut through the latigo and trot out the real deals in cinematic ropers and wranglers...after a word or two about a man regarded as the first movie star of the western genre, Broncho Billy Anderson. First off, he was a onetime vaudeville performer in New York City, born Maxwell Aronson to Jewish parents. He also worked as a photographer's model and newspaper vendor before entering the movie industry in the early 1900s as a star, director, and co-founder of Chicago-based Essany Studios. Secondly, he couldn't spell "bronco." The word "broncho" generally means "related to the bronchi."

Broncho Billy Anderson at home on the range in Chicago,
with nary a buffalo nor deer and antelope in sight.

So, the question remains, who were the real cowboys in Hollywood?

Born in 1892, Edmond "Hoot" Gibson literally ran away from home as a kid to join the circus. He worked as a cowpuncher in Colorado and Wyoming before finding employment at the famed 101 Ranch near Fort Bliss, Oregon. While dabbling in Hollywood as a stunt double, he won the title All-Around Champion Cowboy at Oregon's Pendleton Round-Up at age 20. That same year, he won the steer-roping World Championship at the Calgary Stampede.

 

Accounts of the origin of his nickname Hoot vary,
among them that in his youth, he liked  to hunt owls,
or he once worked as a messenger for Owl Drug Company.

After serving as a sergeant with the U.S. Army's Tank Corps in World War I, Gibson raised his position as a costar in western shorts to solo stardom. He might not have been matinee-idol handsome, but it was exactly his boyish looks, tongue-in-cheek demeanor, and non-threatening presence (he seldom used a gun in his pictures) that appealed to women and children, elevating him to superstar status rivaling his contemporary, Tom Mix. He appeared in 224 films. One of his last screen appearances was a supporting role as a Union sergeant in director John Ford's "The Horse Soldiers" in 1959.

According to debatable accounts, Buck Jones, born Charles Gebhart, learned his riding, roping, and shooting skills growing up on a Oklahoma ranch, although he was born in western Indiana. He managed to join the U.S. Army at 16 and was wounded during the pre-World War I Moro uprising of Muslim tribes in the Philippines. After taking a menial job in the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, he soon became a champion bronco buster. He trained horses for the Allied forces before touring with the Ringling Brothers Circus, then settling in Hollywood. He quickly became one of the westerns' most successful and popular stars, receiving more fan mail than any other actor in the world.

"I put resin on my chaps to help hold me in the saddle,"
Buck Jones said, "and drive horseshoe nails into the
heel of my boots to keep my spurs on."

Buck Jones married a professional horse rider named Odille "Dell" Osborne in a ceremony at a Wild West Show that footed the bill. Tragically, Jones perished in the notorious Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston that claimed 492 lives, the deadliest nightclub fire in history, on November 28, 1942. Urban legend holds that Jones had initially escaped the blazes but died while venturing back into the inferno to save others.

As a young man, Indiana native Ken Maynard, who had started riding in carnivals and circuses, performed in rodeos and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War I, Maynard was encouraged by Buck Jones to try out for the movies. He started appearing in silent westerns in the early 1920s as a stunt man and supporting actor. Before long, his rugged features and horsemanship made him a cowboy star.

"He could take jumps and hurdles on that horse of his that you
wouldn't want to take in a biplane," an author noted. "Any kind of
flying mount or dismount was merely exercise for Ken Maynard."

Unfortunately, Maynard had a temper to match his enormous ego. A heavy drinker and spendthrift, he built a reputation of alienating everyone he worked with. Widely regarded as an arrogant s.o.b., he was also known for mistreating his horses. One of his directors recalled, "One day, he got upset at one of his horses, and he ran it straight into a tree...When the horse tried to shy away from the tree, Maynard jumped off the horse, jerking the reins with him, and caused the poor animal to charge directly into the tree with such force that the horse was knocked to the ground. It was sickening."

Mention the singing cowboy, and the names Gene Autry and Roy Rogers immediately come to mind, but the first singing cowboy, despite his shortcomings, was the above-mentioned Ken Maynard, who started in silent films but recorded two songs for Columbia Records before appearing in his first movie with a musical soundtrack.

Gene Autry, born Orvon Grover Autry, worked as a telegraph operator for the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway. He passed the lonely hours on the midnight shift accompanying himself on a guitar, which eventually got him fired, but not before a customer, famed humorist Will Rogers, encouraged him to sing professionally.

Autry, who wrote over 200 songs (one of which was not his hit recording of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," written by Jewish tunesmith Johnny Marks), retired from films in the 1950s and turned his astute business savvy into millions of dollars from his investments in real estate, hotels, radio stations, and the California Angels baseball team.

Roy Rogers, born Leonard Slye, learned horsemanship on the family farm in Duck Run, Ohio. With no radio, the family made their own entertainment with music and by hosting square dances. He eventually played in such ensembles as The Hollywood Hillbillies, Rocky Mountaineers, Texas Outlaws, International Cowboys, and, most famously, Sons of the Pioneers. In fact, it was performances with the Sons of the Pioneers that led to Roy's film career.

Gene Autry and Roy Rogers strike a no-hard-feelings pose
between singing cowboys.

Rex Allen, born on a ranch in Arizona's Cochise County, began his show business career in the East as a vaudeville singer. After working as a performer on an AM radio program in Chicago, he moved to Hollywood in 1949 and signed with Mercury Records. At the time, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were popular box-office draws, and Republic Pictures gave Allen a screen test, leading to a contract signing.

Early in his film career, Rex Allen worked with Buddy Ebsen as his sidekick (pictured above). In over a dozen B-westerns, Allen's sidekick was portrayed by erstwhile rodeo clown Slim Pickens (pictured below).

Rex Allen once remembered, "I rode bulls and bucking horses for about two years when I first got out of high school, but I got tired of picking myself up off the arena floor. I found that a guitar never kicked me...so I decided to stick with that." In the mid-1950s, Allen became an in-demand narrator for Disney nature documentaries, like "The Horse of the West," "The Hound That Thought He Was a Raccoon," "The Yellowstone Cubs," and "Ringo, the Refugee Raccoon."

Born Winifred Maurice Harrison, Oklahoma native son Sunset Carson was an accomplished rodeo rider in his youth. He worked in a western show operated by Tom Mix. He claimed to have appeared in bit parts in movies, as Michael Harrison, before going to South America, where he claimed to win the Champion All-Around Cowboy two years in a row in Buenos Aires.

"Riding horses is nothing new to me," Sunset Carson said. "I've
ridden them all my life...I rode a horse to school...In my pictures,
I rode most of the time with only one hand. That was a habit
I picked up from riding in rodeos."

In 1944, Republic Pictures signed him to a contract for his own series of B-westerns and changed his name to Sunset Carson. Not more than a couple years later, he and the studio were having problems. He insisted the dispute was over his contract, but the studio head fired Carson when the cowboy showed up drunk at a studio function with an underage girl on his arm. Carson's last film role was in the 1985 sci-fi western "Alien Outlaw" (26 years before "Cowboys & Aliens").

Rodeo work came easily to Ben Johnson early in life as the son of a rancher and rodeo champion. Of Irish and Cherokee descent, Johnson was born on an Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma.

"I grew up on a ranch and I know livestock," Johnson once said,
"so I like working in westerns. All my life I've been afraid of failure.
To avoid it I've stuck with doing things I know how to do,
and it's made me a good living."

Johnson's Hollywood career began when producer Howard Hughes, preparing to film "The Outlaw," with Jane Russell, bought horses at the ranch Ben's father managed and hired the young Johnson to take the horses to Arizona and then on to California. Once in Hollywood, Johnson landed film work wrangling horses and performing stunts that involved horses.

He was Henry Fonda's riding double in director John Ford's 1948 cavalry western "Fort Apache." During production, when the horses pulling a munitions wagon with men aboard stampeded out of control, Johnson rode to the rescue and stopped the runaway wagon. John Ford rewarded Johnson with a seven-year contract. The novice actor would make five more pictures with Ford. In the early 1950s, Johnson left the movies to return to the rodeo circuit, but he quickly learned that film work paid better and hastily rode back to Hollywood.

Alan Ladd can't look at those fancy britches on Ben Johnson without
smirking in "Shane." "I'd been making a dollar a day as a cowboy,"
Johnson said, "and my first check in Hollywood was for $300. After
that, you couldn't have driven me back to Oklahoma with a club."

Among Ben Johnson's many screen roles were a brief but memorably sympathetic turn as a hired gun with a conscience in the 1953 classic western "Shane" and his 1971 Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winning performance as Sam "The Lion," the sagacious movie theater owner in a dying Texas town, in director Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show." Johnson worked with director Sam Peckinpah in four films, most notably as Tector, of the infamous Gorch brothers, in 1969's "The Wild Bunch" (pictured below).

"Let's go." "Why not?" Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden,
and Ernest Borgnine march to their fate and into cinematic
immortality in "The Wild Bunch."

When his ranch hands light out for a gold rush, cattle boss Wil Anderson (John Wayne) is left shorthanded for a 350-plus-mile livestock drive from Bozeman, Montana, to Belle Fourche, South Dakota, in the 1972 western "The Cowboys." As a last resort, Anderson recruits a handful of inexperienced boys from the local one-room schoolhouse as replacement drovers.

It's difficult to believe that during their venerable individual careers,
John Wayne and Slim Pickens worked together in only two films, one
being "The Cowboys," with Slim portraying a Bozeman townsman.

Directed by Mark Rydell (best known for "The Rose" and "On Golden Pond"), the cast of nearly a dozen boys was made up of roughly half actors, including Robert Carradine in his film debut, and half genuine cowkids, among them plucky, pint-sized Clay O'Brien. O'Brien's stepfather, Gene O'Brien, wrangled horses for such TV westerns as "Bonanza" and "Gunsmoke," which is how nine-year-old Clay earned an audition for "The Cowboys."

Clay O'Brien stands beside John Wayne (far right) on location.

John Wayne, who always appreciated a real cowboy when he met one, took an immediate shine to the diminutive O'Brien. He cast him as his youngest son, "Budger," in the 1973 western "Cahill U.S. Marshal." Besides TV work, O'Brien appeared in "One Little Indian" and "The Apple Dumpling Gang," both for Walt Disney Productions. He was paired with Roy Rogers in Roy's final movie, 1975's "Mackintosh and T.J." (pictured below), after which O'Brien turned his back on Hollywood to concentrate full-time on the rodeo, riding as Clay O'Brien Cooper.

Cooper has won several team-roping world championships. He has appeared in numerous Wrangler National Finals Rodeos, with, as of 2014, a career total of $2.5 million. In 1997, he was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. Proud to call himself a Christian cowboy, he has been a longtime speaker in cowboy churches and rodeo camps.

Clay O'Brien Cooper shows off his roping skills. Now in his 50s,
he's content to rope "as long as I have a desire to compete."

Recalling his few years in the movies, Cooper said, "I was blessed to have met some pretty iconic people. It was a good experience." As for working with John Wayne, he noted, "He was the same off camera as he was on it. He was a good guy." He recalled, "It was a blessing to have an opportunity as a little kid to play in a movie with an icon of American history."

"It seems like my life has been a fairy tale the whole way along."

We've tried to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, splitting up the real deal and the rhinestone cowboys. Kind of like setting apart the Stetson hats from the helmets.

Speaking of which, what, if any, other sports will start incorporating helmets as part of their gear?

One thing's for sure - only time will tell...