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You can ride, and sing, and wear pointy-toed boots -- there are no guarantees. And the Horse He Rode In OnBy Rick Horowitz He wasn't the only one, you know -- that's what you have to understand. Back in the days when a man was a man and a fella's best friend was his trusty .45, Roy Rogers may have been right on top of the singing-cowboy heap, but a few of us were nipping at his heels every step of the way. A break here, a break there, and it all could have been different. Not that I'm bitter. Roy deserved everything he got, and a nicer man you'd never want to meet. It's just that you can't help looking back and speculating -- especially coming so close the way I did. Back then, of course, being a singing cowboy was every youngster's dream. Fighting the bad guys, standing up for what's right and then tossing off a catchy tune -- was there ever a better way to earn a paycheck? Not for me, so I bought myself the shiniest, pointiest cowboy duds I could find and headed west, to Hollywood. Those first few nights at the boarding house, I could barely sleep for all the excitement, not to mention all the yodeling. Yodeling and strumming, strumming and yodeling -- you couldn't hear yourself think! Now personally, I always figured the yodel was overrated. Other than singing cowboys, the only folks who ever yodeled lived in Switzerland, and I never saw a decent movie with a Swiss cowboy in it in my life, then or since. Which is why I came up with the saxophone. So it wasn't the best career move, but how was I supposed to know that? You make your choices and you live with them. I'll never forget the day I heard that Roy was "King of the Cowboys." This is when Gene Autry was in the service, and the rest of us were scuffling to be the next Gene Autry. I'd just come off the lot (a bit part in "Saddle Sores at Sunset"), and I opened up "Variety" and there it was. I didn't even know cowboys had a king. I think it was something his agent dreamed up. So I called my agent and I said, "Murray, what gives? Roy's 'King of the Cowboys' and I'm sitting here spinning my six-shooters!" So we tried to come up with something as good as Roy had. We tried "Prince of the Cowboys," except that "King" outranked "Prince" and everyone knew it. We tried "Emperor of the Cowboys." "Archduke of the Cowboys." Everything. We couldn't make a dent. That and the sidekick thing. I never liked sidekicks. I figured any talking a cowboy needed to do, he could do with his horse. Murray didn't see it that way. "Roy's got a sidekick," he kept saying. "You have to have a sidekick." So I hired the first guy who answered the ad. "Nasty Nick, the Ropin' Sidekick" -- that's how we billed him. Worked out pretty well, at least until those warrants caught up with him. I still think that business with the buffalo was a misunderstanding. In fact, now that I look back on it, animals always were my downfall -- and I'm not talking about Stagger. That horse was the best thing that ever happened to me, even with the cataracts. I'm thinking more about that fight over the dog. By that time, you have to realize, Roy was huge. He had his dog, Bullet, so all the rest of us had to have dogs, too. Anyway, one day I show up for my big scene in "Eight-Gallon Hat" and the director says, "Where's your dog?" I don't like dogs, I tell him. You have to have a dog, he says. This goes on for two, three days, and we're holding up the whole production. Finally, I decide to be big about it, so I go down to the animal shelter and I get Ricochet and bring him onto the set. "That's an otter," the director says. I know it's an otter, I tell him. Why can't we be different? "He has to run alongside a galloping horse," the director says. "An otter can't run that fast." "I can slow down," I tell him. In "Variety" the next week, they said it was "creative differences." After that, it got harder and harder to find work. Meanwhile, Roy was on lunchboxes and TV and then all those restaurants -- Not that I'm bitter. I just wonder, that's all. Anyway, the otter still looks great over the fireplace. Posted
7/7/98. Fresh stuff right here twice
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