Tom Mix and Other Cowboys of the Silver Screen

Long before the interstates, when pavement was rare and dirt roads wound their way between Arizona's small towns, neighbors gathered on an indoor Friday night, sitting on long benches, popcorn in hand, their attention riveted on their heroes riding across a small grainy screen. From the well-worn and scratchy speakers came the sounds of pounding hooves, barking six-guns, and Tex Ritter singing a song atop his stallion, White Flash. Motion picture night was in full swing at the dance hall next door to the Lower Bar in Mayer, Arizona, in the late 1940s, and every child there wanted to be a cowboy hero.

Arizona's Cellu

Arizona days, Ritter sang, in his rich East Texas drawl, Arizona ways, Arizona lights, won my heart at a glance. For Western actors, from the silent era to the 1990s' blockbusters, the real West of Arizona won their hearts, and many adopted the Grand Canyon State as their home.

"He was a true son of the Old West," Gene Autry once said of Tom Mix, who in reality was a true son of Pennsylvania. Autry was more correct when he asked the question: "Could anyone have written a character more colorful than Mix?"

Beginning in 1913, the year after Arizona achieved statehood, the real West of Prescott and Yavapai County met Tom Mix. Working for motion picture pioneer Col. William N. Selig, who was always looking for authentic Western locations, Mix moved with Selig's company of actors from Colorado to Prescott where they lived on the Diamond S Ranch outside of town. Yavapai County with its working cattle ranches and hard-riding cowboys was the perfect match for the handsome, wiry, slightly bowlegged Mix as he began his rise to immortality.

At home among local cowboys, Mix competed in Prescott's Frontier Days Rodeo, showing off his skills in Trick and Fancy Roping and winning first place in Bulldogging, Steer Riding, and the Potato Sack Race.

During his two years in Prescott, Mix did his own acting stunts, riding off cliffs, jumping off stagecoaches, and firing live ammunition. His films, with such titles as Sheriff of Yavapai County, Cupid in the Cow Camp, and Physical Culture on the Quarter Circle V Bar, drew many of their stories from local lore.

Mix's challenging stunts took their toll on Old Blue, his first film horse, whom he replaced with a young colt to be named Tony. Mix and "Tony the Wonder Horse" soon set the standard for all future motion picture heroes and their trick horses.

By 1920 Tom Mix was America's top Western actor. Under contract to Fox studio in Los Angeles, he earned $17,500 a week, owned a Beverly Hills mansion, and drove a Rolls Royce with a silver saddle built into the hood. Hollywood fame did not prevent Mix from returning to Arizona. His love of Yavapai County brought him back to make films for Fox in the 1920s.

The late author and Prescott native Budge Ruffner remembered his boyhood idol's visits to Prescott: "My father was a good friend of his. One Sunday he took me to see Tom Mix out at the American Ranch in Williamson Valley. Mix was riding and roping for the local kids. He took off on Tony as fast as he could across this flat, and the wind caught his hat, and it flew off. He turned the horse around, and at a full gallop, leaned down from the saddle and picked up his hat. Well, after that, every kid in Prescott was trying the same

The Shotgun Man Stage Driver

(LEFT) During 1913 and 1914, Tom Mix made at least 30 oneand two-reel silent adventures at the Selig Polyscope Ranch near Prescott. One of them, The Shotgun Man and the Stage Driver, was advertised on this handbill at the Elk's Theater in Prescott. ARIZONA HISTORICAL FOUNDATION (ABOVE) In 1922, at the height of his box office fame and making $17,500 a week, Tom Mix returned to his beloved Arizona with the William Fox Film Corporation to make the five-reel silent Western adventure Sky High at the Grand Canyon. Mix returned on numerous occasions in the 1920s to film near Prescott and around Arizona.

(RIGHT) In 1940 Tex Ritter and Evelyn Finley filmed Arizona Frontier at Granite Dells, near Prescott. During the filming, Ritter may have spent time with his future in-laws, Dr. Harry and Mrs. Harriet Fay Southworth, the proud parents of actress Dorothy Fay. BOTH FROM EDDIE BRANDT'S SATURDAY MATINEE

Celluloid Cowboys

stunt, and there were a lot of broken collarbones, including mine.

Reflecting on Mix the cowboy film hero, Ruffner said, “Tom Mix was the pioneer. He was the cutting edge. The front-runner of all Arizona cowboy heroes.

Not all were cowboy heroes. Every silver screen hero needed a heroine, and Ruffner had grown up with one in Prescott, Dorothy Fay Southwick, the talented daughter of a local doctor. At the urging of her parents, Dorothy left Prescott to study ballet in Chicago. Dancing took her to England, where she began acting, took the stage name of Dorothy Fay, and made her theater debut. In 1938, after a role in the Broadway play Good Neighbors, she went to Hollywood. The studio there typecast her for Westerns, publicizing that she grew up “riding mustangs and learning to rope cattle on her uncle's Arizona ranch at the early age of 11.

From ballet and Broadway to bullets and boots, Dorothy Fay was destined for Western stardom. She made her film debut opposite cowboy star Buck Jones. Her horseopera career led her to meet another exBroadway performer, Tex Ritter. With his engaging Texas style, Ritter would soon challenge Gene Autry as America's number one singing cowboy. Dorothy Fay not only became Ritter's leading lady, she became his wife. Ironically, Ritter's only movie filmed in Prescott, Arizona Frontier, was made the year before he met Dorothy Fay.

The two were married in Prescott's Congregational Church. “I was an usher in the wedding,” Budge Ruffner remembered, “as was Barry Goldwater. Barry was wearing a white Palm Beach suit for the wedding. On his way, driving up Yarnell Hill outside of Prescott, he had a flat. Not wanting to get his suit dirty, he got out of the car, stripped down to his underwear and his shoes, paid no attention to the other cars passing him by, and changed the tire.

Dorothy Fay became the first of a series of homegrown Arizonans to make their mark in Western films. Andy Devine, from Kingman, whose highpitched voice and feigned awkwardness endeared him to generations of fans as the ultimate sidekick; Miami, Arizona, native Jack Elam, who began his

Celluloid Cowboys

Hollywood career as a studio accountant only to become a crazy-eyed villain in numerous Westerns; and two others, Rex Allen from Willcox and Marty Robbins of Glendale, whose singing talents would bring them motion picture fame as cowboy heroes.

"The era of the 'singing cowboy,'" Rex Allen remembers, "had started at Republic Pictures with Gene Autry's Tumbling Tumbleweeds and ended with my last picture, The Phantom Stallion, in 1954." Allen, now 76, grew up fluent in English and Spanish, hearing tales of Old Arizona from his mom and dad and local cowboys. Times were hard, though, and after his brother's death from a rattlesnake bite, the family moved from their ranch 80 miles outside Willcox to a farm closer to town. Allen's father, who played fiddle, soon had young Rex accompanying him on guitar at local dances.

Loving to play and sing, Allen earned spare change singing in a barbershop on Saturday afternoons, and he performed in front of the local theater to earn his way inside to see his shoot'em-up heroes: Gene Autry, Buck Jones, Roy Rogers, and Bob Steele.

After rising to fame on Chicago's WLS "National Barn Dance," Allen took his singing to Hollywood. Following the trail of his film heroes, he became a singing cowboy. Like Mix, Autry, Ritter, and Rogers, he, too, shared billing with his horse, riding and singing his way to fame for Republic Pictures as "The Arizona Cowboy and His Wonder Horse, Koko." (See Arizona Highways, Oct. '95.) Mary Ellen Ruffalo of Scottsdale, then known as Mary Ellen Kay, a slender and pretty redhead from Ohio, came to Los Angeles after a brief career as a big-band singer on the East Coast. She became Allen's leading lady in six of his Republic films. Growing up in Girard, Ohio, she had fallen in love with Westerns.

"I always knew I'd live in the West someday," she says. And there she was in the West and on the big screen as Rex Allen's leading lady. "Rex was just himself," she recalls of their films together, "and in good B-Western fashion, I never got a kiss from the hero. At the end, it was always 'there he goes into the sunset with the horse.'"

Mary Ellen Kay would later act with Marty Robbins, another Arizona native who grew up hoping to be a singing cowboy in Westerns. "I'd seen every Gene Autry movie as a kid and tried to imitate him, but not seriously," Robbins once told a reporter. Born Martin David Robinson in Glendale in 1925, he gave up work as a ditchdigger to fill in for a local country and western band in Phoenix, changing his name to Marty Robbins. Soon he had his own Phoenix-based television show. Columbia Records signed him in 1952.

Until his death in 1982, Robbins, with such hit recordings as “El Paso,” had become one of America’s biggest country and western stars. Lesser known was his desire to be a cowboy actor. Between 1953 and 1973, Robbins starred in five of the last B-Westerns, including The Ballad of a Gunfighter. Friends of Robbins once said the singer wished he’d been a frontier sheriff. “He’d enjoy a frontier shoot-out every day,” they said.

Celluloid Cowboys

recordings as “El Paso,” had become one of America’s biggest country and western stars. Lesser known was his desire to be a cowboy actor. Between 1953 and 1973, Robbins starred in five of the last B-Westerns, including The Ballad of a Gunfighter. Friends of Robbins once said the singer wished he’d been a frontier sheriff. “He’d enjoy a frontier shoot-out every day,” they said.

Like Tom Mix, who came to Arizona to create the early cowboy hero in the silent era, John Wayne, a onetime B-Western singing cowboy, came to the Grand Canyon State to ride a stage through Monument Valley and into fame as the most popular cowboy hero of all time. From Old Tucson to Sedona to Monument Valley, Wayne and Arizona became filmmaking and business partners for nearly four decades. While appearing in such motion pictures as Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Hondo, Rio Bravo, and The Searchers, he invested in the 26 Bar Ranch near Springerville and a cotton and grain farm near Stanfield. Wayne loved Arizona, its landscape, its artists, and its people. Burt Kennedy, Western film director and Cowboy Hall of Fame inductee, directed Wayne in two films. He summed up The Duke best when he said: “He was the number one guy. A legend. There’re certain guys who can fill the screen. When you’re in Monument Valley, he looked as big as the countryside. He was the best.” (See Arizona Highways, Jan. '92.) While other Western actors such as Col. Tim McCoy and Lee Marvin would make the state their home, none, perhaps, exemplified the era of Arizona’s cowboy heroes more than the late Ben Johnson. “No one ever looked better on a horse,” wrote Harry Carey Jr. of his longtime friend. Johnson’s first Arizona Western was The Outlaw, followed by other Arizona classics such as Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wagon Master, Rio Grande, Cheyenne Autumn, and his last Arizona film, Junior Bonner.

The son of a world champion roper, Ben also became a world champion on the rodeo circuit, while his career in Hollywood would earn him an Academy Award.

One night in Prescott, during the filming of Junior Bonner, a cowboy followed Johnson outside Whiskey Row’s Palace Bar, testing the man he figured might be more Hollywood than cowboy. His patience worn, Johnson turned and quietly told the cowboy if he said

John Ford's RIO GRANDE

(ABOVE) John Wayne and John Ford teamed up five times to make movies in Monument Valley, including Republic Picture's Rio Grande in 1950.

(RIGHT) Miami, Arizona, native Jack Elam co-starred with Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda in Firecreek, a 1967 Western filmed in Sedona. EDDIE BRANDT'S SATURDAY MATINEE (BELOW) Three late, great cowboys, Ben Johnson, Johnny Mullins, and Casey Tibbs, gathered at the Palace Bar on Prescott's Whiskey Row during the filming of Junior Bonner in 1971. THE LESTER WARD "BUDGE" RUFFNER COLLECTION, ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, TUCSON One more word, his nose would quickly be rearranged. The cowboy smiled, then offered his hand. "You are my kind of man," he said.

"I don't need to say a lot of words," Ben Johnson said of his acting. Yet there are not enough words to describe his role as the cowboy hero, on and off the screen. Harry Carey Jr. said it best in his autobiography, Company of Heroes, "He's all cowboy inside." (See Arizona Highways, Jan. '96 and Feb. '97.) In films as in real life, the Arizona landscape and our Western heroes are inseparable. Often bigger than life, these men and women still represent good over evil, justice over injustice, right over wrong. "I'm glad we had those days," Mary Ellen Kay says today. "I think a lot of people are. But perhaps no one summed it up better than John Wayne when he said: "The cowboy is the folklore of America. In the portrayal we've done in pictures, we have tried to show the finer, more manly qualities of fellas under stress, weather, the elements, or other troubles."

Cowboy Photo Workshop: "True Grit in the Western Tradition," a Photo Workshop sponsored by the Friends of Arizona Highways and led by photographer Ken Akers, takes a look at the life of real cowboys. The workshop also offers the opportunity to photograph cowboys at work on a ranch. For information, contact the Friends, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; (602) 271-5904.

Jeb J. Rosebrook, a novelist and screen and television writer who lives in Scottsdale, wrote the original screenplay for Junior Bonner after an inspiring trip to Prescott Frontier Days in 1970. As a 10-year-old student at the Orme School, he was in the audience the night Tex Ritter rode across the screen in that Mayer dance hall.

Jeb S. Rosebrook, when not working as research editor for Arizona Highways or writing his dissertation on Arizona minor league baseball, is teaching his 10-month-old son, Jeb A. Rosebrook, about cowboy heroes, just like his father taught him.