Oologah to Hollywood
By: Steve Russell
Tags: Aviation, Journalism, History, Movies, Oklahoma

Original poster for one of five movies released in 1935.

Will Rogers was born to Cherokee parents in 19th century Indian Territory, the rural backwater where Indian tribes were sent to fade from the pages of history. How this Paint Clan Cherokee became a potent force in US politics started with his rise to dominance of the entertainment business, and at the time of his birth one accomplishment was about as improbable as the other. His unlikely story remains an inspiration to modern Indians, who remain mostly rural people with limited access to all the things thought to be necessary for rising to national prominence.

The perpetual debate about the lives of people who rise from humble beginnings is how much was pluck and how much was luck? Will Rogers did not come from poverty but rather from obscurity. The Cherokee Nation, before the Dawes Act, had managed to rebound from the worst economic effects if not the memories of the Trail of Tears and the Civil War. Will was able to sell livestock to fund a first class ticket when he decided to use his skills in Argentina. When Argentina didn’t work out, Lady Luck visited him many times, and Will was ready to take her by the hand.

Will left Indian Territory in 1902 as a cowboy and returned in 1904 as an entertainer. He started on a passenger ship to London because that was the only place to get a ship to Buenos Aires. Failing to become an Argentine cattle baron, he earned his passage on a freighter to South Africa nursemaiding livestock, and then became The Cherokee Kid, an entertainer roping and riding in Texas Jack’s Wild West Show. “Texas Jack” was real enough, but his show took certain liberties made necessary by the location, such as having Zulus and Asian Indians play the part of American Indians in fake battles.

Will’s hiring by Texas Jack involved bad or good luck, depending on your point of view. Texas Jack had, unbeknownst to Will, offered a reward for anybody who could do a rope trick called the “Big Crinoline,” involving a small loop around the performer that is gradually let out to circle in other people, horses, even wagons. Will chose that trick for his audition and was hired on the spot, becoming an employee ineligible to compete for the prize. The good luck was Will’s chance to learn the ropes of show business from Texas Jack, since he already knew the ropes of roping:

“He (Jack) could do a bum act with a rope that an ordinary man couldn’t get away with, and make the audience think it was great, so I used to study him by the hour and from him I learned the great secret of show business — -learned when to get off. It’s the fellow that knows when to quit that the audience wants more of.”

Will saved his $25 a week until he was able to buy a second-class ticket to Australia, where a letter of recommendation from Texas Jack got him on with the Wirth Brothers Circus. He earned enough money for a third class return to San Francisco. As Rogers put it:

“I started out first class, dropped to second class, and came home third class. But when I was companion to those cows on the perfumed voyage to Africa it might be called no class at all.”

Will Rogers arrived back in Indian Territory the year the United States was gearing up, one year late, to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, then as now understood to be a land acquisition that doubled the size of the country. In fact, what Thomas Jefferson had purchased was the first right to acquire the land from the Indians, but that process had been proceeding apace by violent and nonviolent means that made Indians appear in the popular imagination first as obstacles to “Manifest Destiny” and then as romantic representatives of bygone days before “civilization.”

This fantasy fueled the popularity of Wild West Shows in the United States and even around the world. Those shows provided a reliable paycheck for, among lots of fakes, real Indians, real cowboys, and in the case of Will Rogers, a real Indian cowboy.

Will’s first assault on the stateside entertainment business was at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where the major celebration of the Louisiana Purchase took place in the city then as now known as the Gateway to the West. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (as the official title was at the time) ran from April 30 to December 1 of 1904 and drew almost 20 million visitors.

Will played with various other wild west characters, most of them real, in St. Louis. He started in Col. Zach Mulhall’s Wild West Show, but also performed his rope tricks in a burlesque house in St. Louis. It’s perhaps a measure of the realness of the characters involved that the Mulhall show’s run was interrupted by a gunfight between the Colonel and his head stable man that ended with the serious injury of two bystanders and Mulhall carted off to jail.

Some of Mulhall’s cowboys called it quits after the gunfight, but Will Rogers found work in two other shows within the fair, which was centrally located for getting work both in the city of St. Louis and in the region. Will was performing his lasso tricks on a stage in Chicago when the next change in his act came from a random event. A dog from an animal act waiting in the wings ran across the stage while Will was twirling. Instinctively, Will roped the dog. The audience reaction reminded him of one of Texas Jack’s ideas, roping a horse on stage as if the show were outdoors.

Hard work intersected with the luck in the audience reaction when Will bought a pony (named Teddy after Theodore Roosevelt), staked out a plot of ground the size of a stage, and rehearsed until he and the pony had an instinctive feel for the limitations of size.

By spring of 1905, he had an act worthy of New York City, and Col. Zach Mulhall was out of jail to arrange the booking. Will Rogers was playing his rope and pony show in Madison Square Garden, when Lady Luck plucked him from obscurity and he once more took her by the hand.

An eight hundred pound steer escaped and leaped into the stands, terrorizing the audience. “The Indian Will Rogers,” The New York Herald reported, “headed the steer off.” The Herald sub-head announced “Indian Cowpuncher’s Quickness Prevents Harm,” and Will was quick to use the uproar to break out of the Wild West niche and into vaudeville, then considered the heart of American show business.

Before they were killed by motion pictures, vaudeville circuits were the primary employment for entertainers in the U.S. Towns of any serious size had a theater playing these traveling variety shows, with many theaters on each “circuit” and a hierarchy in the pay scales for performers ranging from “small time” to “big time,” the latter located in larger urban areas and paying as much as thousands of dollars a week.

Will’s heroism with the rampaging steer, and the resulting publicity, made him barely salable to the booking agents for the vaudeville circuits. Getting work was one thing, but his path to the “big time” took him from one end of the country to the other, repeatedly.

His work on the vaudeville circuit also gave his act time to mature, in no small part from the influence of his new bride, Betty, who would be his life partner and, in a departure from the customs of Hollywood, his only bride.

Will started as a “dumb act,” meaning that his entire performance was rope tricks, executed in silence. Occasionally, he would miss. His comments on the misses came in the form of self-deprecating humor, which worked so well he was soon missing on purpose to feed his laugh lines. Betty suggested that his tricks were more impressive if he explained them in advance, “calling his shots.”

He drawling narration of his own act became the core of the act. Before long, his rope tricks were something to keep his hands busy while he offered his homespun opinions on the events of the day, absorbed from the local newspapers and rearranged in a manner that highlighted the absurdities of the rich and powerful. The audiences ate it up.

Rogers never made any effort to expand his formal education, but he read newspapers from one end of the country to the other at a time when newspapers still had some local flavor.

“A breakfast without a newspaper is a horse without a saddle,” Will observed. “You are just riding bareback. Take away my ham, take away my eggs, even my chili, but leave me my newspaper.”

However he educated himself, his powers of observation were beyond question.

He once offered the witticism “Weddings are always the same, but no divorces are alike.” This remark bears a striking resemblance to the opening lines of what many consider the finest novel ever written, Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Since the most influential English translation of Anna Karenina was published in 1901, it’s entirely possible that Will Rogers could have read it and been influenced by Tolstoy or it could be a case of the proverbial great minds thinking alike.

Of course, any notion that Will might have read Tolstoy would conflict with his vaudeville persona, the yokel. From about 1915, the Will Rogers draw was as much about the cowboy from Oklahoma looking around at American royalty and finding them buck-naked as it was about his unquestionable skill at throwing a rope. Scholars have compared the bumpkinish public Will Rogers with some fifty love letters he wrote between 1903 and 1908 to Betty Blake, who would become his wife. The Will Rogers in those letters shows a lot more ability to use standard English than he ever displayed on the vaudeville stage.

If the uneducated cowboy persona was exaggerated for the stage, the roots of the man in the mostly rural Cherokee Nation were real and deep. In 1916, Will was about to take the stage in Baltimore when he was told that Woodrow Wilson, then President, was in the audience. By all biographical accounts, Will was somewhat intimidated. Joshing the President to his face was a step beyond his topical humor on the road. Wilson was known to the public as cold and humorless. He had been a college professor when academia was far removed from the lives of ordinary Americans, and that put him on another level as much as his office did.

WIll rose to the occasion, easing into his political remarks with some comments at the expense of Wilson’s adversary in the struggle to control the Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan. Then Rogers offered his opinion on the state of American preparedness for the war that was breaking out in Europe: “There is some talk of getting a machine gun if we can borrow one. The one we have now they are using to train our Army… If we go to war, we will just about have to go to the trouble of getting another gun.”

Wilson laughed. Will went on to poke fun at the ongoing exchange of diplomatic notes with Germany: “Do you realize, people, that at one time in our negotiations with Germany that (Wilson) was five notes behind?”

Wilson went backstage to greet the cast at intermission, and before the year was out, he was quoting Will Rogers in his speeches. Will considered that performance a turning point in his career, and he always appreciated Wilson’s ability to laugh at himself. “You can always tell a big man from a little one,” Will wrote later, “the big ones don’t get sore when you joke about them.”

By 1919, the tenth grade dropout Cherokee had produced two books, The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition and The Cowboy Philosopher on the Peace Conference. Will had occasionally published some of his stage material in newspapers, but in 1922 the McNaught Syndicate hired him to write a weekly column for Sunday editions. In 1926, he went to daily publication, toting a manual typewriter everywhere he went and filing his remarks by Western Union.

In 1922, Will Rogers took his topical humor to radio. After a rough start, he learned that his shows were best done before a live audience, since the essence of his act was ad-libbing on the news of the day and the audience feedback was critical to his ability to find a narrative path.

In one of Will’s radio shows, he got some criticism for mimicking President Calvin Coolidge perhaps too effectively, confusing his listeners, but Coolidge himself sprang to Rogers’ defense.

While Will Rogers was morphing from mere comic to political pundit, show business was shifting under his feet. The change came innocently enough at first, when vaudeville theaters began to incorporate film clips into the live variety shows that had been vaudeville’s stock in trade.

Naturally, there was money to be made producing these silent films. Performers began to film their shows, excepting musical acts and stand up comics. Rogers, with his roping and joking, was in between what would be considered obvious film material.

By 1918, Will was the headliner act for the Ziegfeld Follies, most definitely the “big time” in vaudeville, when Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., announced to the New York newspapers that any member of the Follies who tried to make a motion picture without his permission would be sued for breach of contract.

There was a problem with Ziegfeld’s threat as applied to his most popular act. Will Rogers was working based on a handshake. Did that mean that Will would bail out of the Follies in the middle of the 1918 run? It did not. Will considered his word binding, and he never missed a performance of the Follies while making his first movie, Laughing Bill Hyde, for a producer named Sam Goldfish (formerly Schmuel Gelbfisz), who would later change his name to Goldwyn, and become part of M-G-M Studios.

When Laughing Bill Hyde was a hit, Goldfish offered Rogers a one-year contract at $2,250 a week, with an option for another year at $3000 a week. This was very good money for the times, and Will then had four children. The contract required a move to Hollywood, no small undertaking with his family and his horses. Ziegfeld was offering to produce a show centered on Will as an inducement to stay in New York.

After a serious consultation with his wife, Will reported to Goldwyn Studios in California in June of 1919 to begin his second movie, Almost a Husband. Will’s silent comedies, some fifty in number made between 1918 and 1927, were mostly the lightest of light entertainment. Not all of these films survive, but there are plenty of descriptions.

In our times, there was a similar series of movies made for a public that wanted to see Elvis Presley. They were not great art, but they took every opportunity to let Elvis sing. Will’s films were made for people who wanted to see Will Rogers, and they took every opportunity to let him throw a rope, which was a bit harder to write into a script than a song.

It might have been the difficulty of working rope tricks into scripts that led Will Rogers to near bankruptcy after his contract with Goldwyn Studios ended. Will undertook to produce himself in The Ropin’ Fool, a showcase for his skills that is probably his most historically important film from the silent years, but at the time sent him back to the stage and on a series of lecture tours to pay his debts.

It would not be until March 22, 1929, that Hollywood would get the full impact of Will Rogers. This was the day he signed a contract with Fox Film Corporation to make four “talkies” over a period of two years for $600,000. The addition of Will’s Oklahoma drawl had the same effect on his movie career that the addition of commentary on current events had on his vaudeville act.

Will Rogers first cracked the top ten American box office draws in 1932 at number nine, the spot occupied by Rin Tin Tin two years earlier. For the last three years of his life, Will remained in the top two.

Will got to be recognized by the Hollywood establishment enough to emcee the Oscars in 1934. Characteristically, he used the occasion to poke fun at the movie business: “It’s a racket, and if it wasn’t we all wouldn’t be up here in dress clothes.” On the pretentious title, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Will opined, “If the movies are an art, I kinda think it’ll leak out without bein’ told; and if they’re a science — then it’s a miracle.” Photoplay magazine, in June of 1934, commented “Will’s wit changed the big affair from the customary ceremony of long-winded speeches into a joyous riot.”

By the end of his life in 1935, the Cherokee from Indian Territory had by hard work and luck become a dominant force in all the entertainment media of his time: print, radio, and motion pictures.

Will used to give his birthplace as Claremore, Oklahoma, “because white people can’t pronounce Oologah.” He was joking, and a map of Oklahoma shows Indian names all over the place that lots of white people manage to navigate. The real reason was perhaps that Claremore is a small town but Oologah is practically no town, and the farmers and ranchers in the vicinity wanted to keep it that way.

The Will Rogers Memorial Museum is located in Claremore. Will’s real birthplace, the Dog Iron Ranch in Oologah, can perhaps be visited with scuba gear since the Verdigris River was dammed to create a lake where the Rogers place used to be. The original ranch house was removed to the shore of Oologah Lake to satisfy the many visitors who still come searching for the Cherokee cowboy within the Cherokee Nation.

There is one item on exhibition in the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore that I can never view with dry eyes: Will’s typewriter, on which he produced his wisecracks about the news of the day for every major newspaper in the country. It is displayed as it was found, mangled in the plane crash that took Will’s life. The cowboy pundit had been in the process of recounting a story he had been told on an earlier stop about a husky’s fatal encounter with a polar bear. The last word Will Rogers typed was “death.”