The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

The first mate’s real surname isn’t Rider. His face isn’t one I’d forget, though the absence of the white ten-gallon hat makes it seem less familiar. He was the great film hero of my childhood, right up there with my book heroes: Tarzan, John Carter of Barsoom, Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy of Oz, and Odysseus. Out of the 260 western movies he made, I saw at least forty. These were second or third runs in the second-class Grand, Princess, Columbia, and Apollo theaters in Peoria. (All vanished long before I was fifty.) His movies gave me some of my most golden hours. I don’t remember the details or the scenes of a single one-they all blur into a sort of glittering montage with Rider as a giant figure in the center.

When I was about fifty-two years old, I became interested in writing biographies. You know that I had planned for many years to write a massive life of Sir Richard Francis Burton, the famous or infamous nineteenth-century explorer, author, translator, swords­man, anthropologist, etc.

But financial exigencies kept me too busy to do much on A Rough Knight for the Queen. Finally, just as I was ready to start full time on Knight, Byron Farwell came out with an excellent biography of Burton. So I decided to wait a few years, until the market could take another Burton bio. And just as I was about to start again, Fawn Brodie’s life of Burton- probably the best-was published.

So I put off the project for ten years. Meanwhile, I decided to write a biography of my favorite childhood film hero (though I ranked Douglas Fairbanks, Senior, as my other top favorite).

I’d read a lot of articles about my hero in movie and western magazines and newspaper clippings. These depicted him as having led a life more adventurous and flamboyant than those of the heroes he played in films.

But I still did not have the money to quit writing fiction long enough to travel around the country interviewing people who’d known him-even if I could have found them. There were some who could have given me details of his careers as a Texas Ranger, a U.S. Marshal in New Mexico, a deputy sheriff in the Oklahoma Territory, a Rough Rider with Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, a soldier in the Philippine Insurrection and the Boxer Rebellion, a horse breaker for the British and possibly as a mercenary for both sides in the Boer War, as a mercenary for Madero in Mexico, as a Wild West show performer, and as the highest-paid movie actor of his time.

The articles about him couldn’t be trusted. Even those who claimed to have known him well gave differing accounts of his life. His obituaries were full of contradictions. And I knew that Fox and Universal had put out a lot of publicity stories about him, most of which had to be checked out for exaggeration or downright lies.

The woman who thought she was his first wife had written a biography of him. You’d never know from it that he had divorced her and married twice thereafter. Or had two daughters by another woman. Or that he had a “drinking problem.” Or an illegitimate son who was a jeweler in London.

She thought she was his first wife, but, as it turned out, she was his second or third. Nobody’s too sure about that.

That he was still a flawless hero to her even after all this says much about the man, though. It says even more about her.

A good friend of mine, Coryell Varoll (you remember him, a circus acrobat, juggler, tightrope walker, gargantuan beer drinker, a Tarzan fan) wrote me about him. In 1964, I think.

“I remember the first time I met him I thought I was meeting God … over the years, being on the same lot with him many times” (in the circus, he means) “the awe fell apart but he was always liked by most people and always idolized by the kids even after he quit making pix … I know that sober he was a swell guy, drunk he’d fight at the least excuse and do some of the damnedest things (don’t we all?). .. I’ve a few dozen stories about him that never made the publications. I’ll tell them the next time we get together.”