Rex Allen: the Man behind the Movies

Rex Allen

He was raised in hard times on a tough land. His father was a rancher trying to survive the Depression. When he was nine, his mother died of blood poisoning in a small town without a hospital. His older brother had died a few years earlier of a rattlesnake bite. There also was the death of an infant sister. But, in the strange balance that can soften the edge of life, Rex Allen was born with a gift. He could sing. Not like an angel. More like the entire celestial choir. When the shooting ended he didn't get off the horse. Instead he rode the personal appearance trail: rodeos, fairs, theaters.

"I was a bass singer in high school," he recalls. "I could do the tenor parts, too." It was a voice that would earn him 1,000 fan letters a day and $75,000 a year as the "Arizona Yodeling Cowboy" singing on radio's WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago. That was back in the '40s when a buck was still worth the paper it was printed on and then some.

There was a time when the name Rex Allen was known in every town that had ever held a rodeo or ever dreamed of being big enough to have one. Every schoolboy who made the weekly pilgrimage to the Saturday matinees knew "The Arizona Cowboy" who shared his billing with a horse called Koko.

Of course, such is the nature of fame that these days, there are visitors to the Rex Allen Museum in his hometown of Willcox who stop at the front desk to ask if the gentleman so honored is still alive. The object of their concern, a very much alive Rex Allen, laughs at his own stories of meeting people who never knew he existed at all, much less that he was the man who sang "Crying in the Chapel" 10 years before a kid named Presley cut the record.

"They'll say, 'Gee, you have kind of a nice voice. Did you ever think of singing?'"

Every chance he got. As he remembers it, he was about 10 or 12 when he was singing outside the theater in Willcox. He was there to attract customers and to earn his own ticket to watch Roy Rogers and Gene Autry keep the West safe for the good folk. Not that the young Allen ever thought he might make it up to that big screen.

his own ticket to watch Roy Rogers and Gene Autry keep the West safe for the good folk. Not that the young Allen ever thought he might make it up to that big screen.

"I didn't really have any great ambitions of getting into show business because I didn't really think I could," he says now.

He didn't think he had the knowledge to make it, and he was sure he didn't have the face. Oh, it was a good face, wide open, all filled with grin and honesty. But Allen had a severely crossed left eye, and even two operations sponsored by the Willcox Rotary Club failed to correct the condition.

After graduating high school in 1939, he left his hometown. "I was just looking for a job doing anything," he remembers. One of those anythings included mixing mud for plasterers in the heat of a Phoenix summer, a stint that whittled his already gangly six-foot-one-inch frame down to 132 pounds. It was in Phoenix that he found a gig, 15 minutes every Saturday, singing on the radio.

Jack Williams was the station announcer, who went on to become a friend of Allen's as well as the governor of Arizona. He well remembers the young man with the magic voice. "It's the most amazing voice I've ever heard, then or now," Williams says.

There was a radio job in Trenton, New Jersey. Then work singing and fiddling with the Sleepy Hollow Gang on WCAU Radio in Philadelphia. Along the way, Allen exercised the rural good sense of never giving up his day job. Although in Trenton, it was night work at a hard-rubber mill. During the summer concerts with the Sleepy Hollow Gang, Allen was selling candy between sets.

The move to Chicago in 1945 changed that. An audition won him a place on the National Barn Dance on WLS. "Maybe I can make it," he remembers thinking then. But there was something he still had to do, and it wasn't going to be easy. He had to try to fix the eye one more time.

As he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, My Life, "You must realize that I had a fear of losing my eyesight."

The operation at the Chicago clinic cost him $75, which he borrowed, and was a success. Then, as Allen wrote, "All of a sudden my life changed."

By 1950 he was in Hollywood with Republic Pictures, following the lead of boyhood idols Autry and Rogers. The first Western he made was appropriately called The Arizona Cowboy. It was the story of a cowboy falsely accused of a crime who goes on to find the real criminals. It was also, according to Allen, "the worst movie that was ever made."

He says he still wants to burn the negative of that one. "I was so green," he claims. But there were to be 18 more Rex Allen Westerns, and he admits, "I was in seventh heaven."

The movies were in black and white, had $40,000 budgets, and took eight days to shoot. He had sidekicks like Slim Pickens and Buddy Ebsen and leading ladies he never kissed. There was always time for a song or two or three. Some were his own; he wrote hundreds.

cowboy from Willcox who was really running the show.

"You get mail from a little boy," Allen recalls. "He says, 'I really like your movies. Please send me a picture of Koko.'"

They were together for 19 years. Koko retired and died at Allen's ranch. When he speaks of him, you can still hear the sense of loss in Allen's voice.

"Part of your life," he muses about his getting too costly. Television was coming in, starting mostly with Westerns, and many small town theaters were closing." There would be a television series for Allen, "Frontier Doctor." There would be years of personal appearances, recordings, film narration for Walt Disney productions, commercial work. However, Allen was never to make the kind of jump John Wayne did, from B-Westerns to the big-budget films.

"Oh, yeah," Allen says now, I'd love to have done that."

According to Gene Autry, he had all it took. "Rex Allen could have been one of the really great Western stars. He was good-looking, could handle action superbly: fights and hard riding and stunts. His problem was that he came to movies too late."

Allen returned to Arizona in 1988 and lives with his wife, Virginia, in a comfortable but unpretentious home not far from where it all began. Fate has continued to play its games. In the '80s, a fall cost him the sight of his right eye. He hasn't lost the gift though. The voice may no longer have the range it did when he sang "Streets of Laredo" in a way that could raise the hair on your arms. But it has the depth. It is a rolling river of a voice.

He can still use it to bring a crowd to its feet when he takes the stage at the Rex Allen Days celebration held each October in Willcox. Then The Arizona Cowboy is back doing two shows on a Saturday night.

A lifetime before, a country boy performed in front of a nearby theater, not even allowing himself much of a dream. Rex Allen remembers him. "I just wanted to sing," he says of that boy. So, he did.

When the shooting ended, he didn't get off the horse. Instead he rode the personal appearance trail: rodeos, fairs, theaters. With him every mile of the way was Koko, The Wonder Horse.

Even if Allen had been the kind of guy who let fame go to his head, Koko would have kept him humble. Allen claims the chocolate brown stallion with the white mane and tail never made a mistake. And when the fans wrote, they reminded the horse. "A big part of your life." He buried Koko's remains in Willcox.

The Rex Allen Westerns only lasted until 1954. "I was the 'last of the Mohicans,' says Allen. "I didn't know it, but when I went there the movie Western was on its way out."

Gene Autry, a friend of Allen since those Hollywood days, explains, "B-Westerns were played out, and the budgets were

Rex Allen