Reposted from January 2004:

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I guess most of you don't care for westerns, but they were a staple
of
the silent era and virtually every studio produced them. Toward the
end of the 1920s, First National's resident cowboy was Ken Maynard,
perhaps the greatest trick rider the western has ever known.

Anyway, this isn't a western tale... it's more of a horror
story.
A true one. It's taken from Jon Tuska's book THE VANISHING LEGION,
with a couple quotes added from Bobby Copeland's TRAIL TALK.


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"I've never approved of his drinking. You see, I don't drink.
Never have. And I don't smoke. I play nine holes of golf every day
I'm
not working. All Ken has done for years is sit around in that trailer
of his and drink."


(Kermit Maynard)


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


During his final years, Ken Maynard was intensely miserable, the
years after his fourth wife, Bertha, was dead and when he himself
wanted nothing more than to die. One day I stopped over to see him at
his trailer and he had the door locked; he said he had a gun and that
he would only let me in if I had brought him a bottle of whiskey.
Fortunately I had a bottle of Jack Daniel's with me. He let me
inside.


After several drinks, I suggested he let me take him out to
dinner, to which proposal, to my surprise, he readily acquiesced.
There was a restaurant nearby which Ken liked and I took him there.
He
ordered a large salad, garnished with thousand island dressing, and
to
this he added a half dozen tablespoons of sugar over the top, so
dependent had he become on sugar. He had been drinking for so many
years and so intensely that even when he was sober, which is to say
even when he had not had a drink for a day or two, he still sounded
as
if he were drunk, talking most of the time in a high-pitched whine.


When we got back to his trailer that night, he showed me his
secret treasure, as he referred to it. It was not his guns and belts;
he had sold those many years before. All he had from his days as a
star were a few old neckerchiefs, his circus scrapbooks, and, hidden,
a box of movie stills. Ken Maynard's secret treasure was his notebook
which he had been keeping on Mary, Our Lady of Fatima.


His condition deteriorated rapidly, but not rapidly enough; a
lifetime of punishing his constitution had met with an heroic
resistance. A hooker and her husband moved in on him, got hold of his
box of stills, and tried to sell them at the cinema shops in Los
Angeles dealing in memorabilia. The hooker claimed at times that she
was married to Ken -- she had prepared a phony marriage certificate
and Ken was too drunk most of the time to know whether it was real or
fake -- and, at other times, she claimed to be his daughter. When
Ken,
covered with bed sores, became a virtual prisoner of these people, I
pulled every string I could and undertook to have Ken moved to the
Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills.


It was there that I saw him for the last time, three weeks
before
he died. He was fond of telling visitors that I knew his pictures
better than he did, and, although he had long refused to allow me to
screen for him any of his films, he finally did ask me to screen THE
STRAWBERRY ROAN [1933]. The screening was held in what the nurses
called the ding-a-ling room, a general screening for all the patients
well enough or cognizant enough to attend.


Ken was wasting away, dying of stomach cancer, a frail,
emaciated
figure, sitting in a wheel chair at the front of the room.


A nurse's aid, brought to tears by the contrast between Ken's
robust form and good nature on the screen and the shriveled, dying
man
in the wheelchair sitting before the screen, fled the room.


I still retained the hope that I might come to know the man who
lived behind the bigger-than-life movie cowboy. He wanted to show his
fellow patients THE STRAWBERRY ROAN because he wanted to demonstrate
somehow what he had done with his life. Or was it that? Could he just
be showing off, being Ken Maynard the movie cowboy one more time?


I was uncomfortable facing the ravages of his disease, the harsh
reminder of mortality. When I started to leave, he called me back to
him, and he looked me straight in the face.


"Good-bye," he said. He extended a thin arm and hand, but the
grip he gave me had strength.


Then his eyes seemed to cloud for a moment and were flickering
suddenly with a harsh intensity. He wanted a cigar. He wanted to go
back to his room. He was a movie cowboy again, being demanding of an
admirer.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


"I've made a lot of money in the business, and have spent
several
fortunes foolishly I know, but I'm just a dumb cowboy, and would
probably do the same things all over again."


(Ken Maynard)


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