WILL ROGERS, THE MAN AND HIS TIMES
by RICHARD M. KETCHUM 415 pages. American Heritage. $12.95.
"I never met a man I didn't like," is his best-remembered saying. He meant it, lived by it and, in the sense that it is inscribed on his tombstone, died with it. Yet it offers a curiously one-dimensional view of the cowboy-performer-columnist-humorist-philosopher who in his day was probably the most beloved man in the world.
Similarly, this biography is wonderfully illustrated-with a helping hand from Will Rogers, who from boyhood on was addicted to getting himself in front of cameras. Author Ketchum had at his disposal just about every known fact about his subject. Yet his book is short on analysis of the motivations of a man who, despite his easygoing reputation, was highly complicated and often contradictory.
Will Rogers dramatized himself as a poor-born "Injun cowboy." But his father, Clement Vann Rogers, was actually a prosperous rancher-politician from the Cooweescoowee country in the Oklahoma territory. (Clem Rogers was one-eighth Cherokee; Will's mother, Mary American Rogers, was one-quarter.) Will never knew want. Far from being a homegrown, home-kept product, he was shipped off to numerous boarding schools (although he and formal education never quite got along).
In 1902, when he was 23, he embarked on a lifelong career as a world traveler.
Rogers really seems to have cared little about money, but he rarely missed a chance to seek more of it. While gentle in person, his humor could be purely insulting. A memorable set of photographs shows a formidable lady−the prototype of a battle-ax dowager in a Groucho Marx movie-gushing over Will as he is about to speak in San Antonio at a barbecue for the Old Trail Drivers Association. Her smile fades as Will gets up and says: "You old trail drivers ... did all right. You'd start out down here with nothing, and after stealing our cattle ... you'd wind up in Abilene with 20,000 head or more."
He had always been a slick hand with a rope, and he drifted into show business in South Africa, billed as "the Cherokee Kid-the man who can lasso the tail joff a blowfly" for Texas Jack's traveling Wild West show. He worked unceasingly at perfecting his skills and soon achieved top billing in U.S. vaudeville, moved on to a star's role offering rope tricks and a wry monologue in Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies. Later the super-puritanical Rogers quit the cast of Eugene O'Neill's Ah! Wilderness because a fan thought it was a dirty play.
By the time of his death, he was the nation's No. 1 motion-picture box-office attraction. (When he died, he was succeeded by Shirley Temple.) Fairly early, Rogers had developed a form of patter to go with his roping act: "Swinging a rope is all right-when your neck ain't in it. Then it's hell." Later he learned that comments about the events of the day brought enthusiastic response: "A joke don't have to be near as funny if it's up to date." This conclusion led him to write a weekly column in the New York Times, which does not ordinarily lend itself to country humor. He also became the most popular after-dinner speaker in history and was a friend to (and critic of) the great and the supposedly great throughout the world.