Prairie Pantaloon

When Will Rogers, the funny man, departed on a great liner to tour Europe, the press took note of his sailing. His arrival, also, was duly recorded. Then a series of excited despatches informed the public whom he met and where he dined; a witticism dropped in a taxicab to an Associated Press reporter was cabled to all the English-speaking world; last week the wires crepitated with the announcement that he had started for Poland to be rude to Marshal Pilsudski. And suddenly a full page advertisement in the leading papers throughout the U. S. heralded the LETTERS OF A SELF MADE DIPLOMAT TO HIS PRESIDENT. A Collection of the Intimate Papers and Letters That is Changing Hands during these Perilous Times of Peace between Our President and his Ambassador -- Without P o r t-folio--Will Rogers

It was an advertisement, of course, for the Saturday Evening Post. Readers ascertained on closer scrutiny that Mr. Rogers was permitting this journal to publish a series of open epistles indited by him to Calvin Coolidge. He had never, he declared, talked to the President. Indeed, the first letter began with an apology. Mr. Rogers was sorry that on his recent visit to Washington he had not called at the White House. He had been too busy. Then, too, he was not sure that the President had any servants; the visit might have been an embarrassment. So he contented himself with giving Mr. Coolidge a graphic survey of the political perils of the times.

Careless readers, puzzled by the misleading spread, thought for an incredulous moment that this prairie pantaloon had actually wriggled into government service-- then they saw their mistake, and laughed, and showed the spread to their friends just as the Curtis Publishing Co. had hoped they would. But, in actual fact, the blurb was not so silly as it seemed. Ambassador! Mr. Rogers is just that.

"Ambassador of the United States to Europe--without Portfolio"--a curious title for a joke-smith. The braided butler of the consular drawing-room chants it through his thorax, scorching the sibilants, booming the o's. The company stares at the newcomer. Famous women turn, over ivory shoulders, a glance cool with appraisal; gentlemen in dinner shirts striped with impossible decorations raise their monocles or feel for their small arms while he shambles into the room--"Viva, l'Ambassadeur." He wears an old grey suit. A jazbo necktie adorns, but fails to hide, the golden collar-stud. His shoes, surely, have never been denied by polish. See how he bows right and left, this gangling fellow, as lean as a lariat, in the old suit and the cracked shoes. His under lip protrudes like the point of a vulgar joke. His jaws move perpetually, up and down, chewing insult, chewing fancy, chewing humor, chewing gum. It is William Penn Adair Rogers, the diplomatist.

This picture is historical. Mr. Rogers has met most of the world's great ones--met them, and tweaked them and, best of all, watched them laugh at his jibes. And somehow, in spite all his elaborately conscious naivete, his warped tie and penny chicle, he is important rather for being a symbol than for being a freak. This curious person tells you about .North America. His mother was a Cherokee Indian. His father was the Living Jingo. He was born on a reservation in Oklahoma in 1881 and grew to manhood on the back of a pinto. His early scavengings in border towns and on the property of neighboring ranchers came to the attention of an officer of the law who hinted that he might be able to advance himself more quickly in some other state. Mr. Rogers went to South America, then by cattle boat to South Africa, returning to the West in time to join the rodeo of Colonel Muhlbach which was about to start on a tour of the U. S. In May, 1905, Colonel Muhlbach's show came to New York and Rogers got into the news for the first time.

He owed this first snip of fame to a berserk steer which, pestered by circling ropes, went mad and jumped the paling that divided the ring from the spectators. In an instant a young cowboy dashed to the spot, swung his rope and, with a deft flick of the wrist, saved the life of a little girl. That young cowboy was not William Penn Adair Rogers. But a reporter liked the name. Rogers found himself a hero. The incident gave him confidence. A little later he kept a boisterous audience quiet by talking to them. Soon he was talking to audiences from the back of a wooden bronco in Keith's theatres. Then came money and fame and the Ziegfeld Follies.

If a man once gets a jester's license half the world will love him and half will fear him and all will ask him to dinner. Millionaires will tell him how to bet and boast of his acquaintance. Hamlet was proud to profess that he had been a friend of Yorick's. Not quite all of the celebrities whom Rogers, with unerring eye, has picked from darkened boxes at the Follies and hailed onto the stage have enjoyed the fun he had at their expense. But they have all laughed. His humor is fearless, nonchalant, and aggressively Western. The New York Times has called him America's Aristophanes, the Herald has hailed him as successor of the famed Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne). Woodrow Wilson admitted that he found Will Roger's political roulades not only funny but "illuminating."

Often he entertains at debutante parties. It is supper time. On little gilt chairs thrown up by the glazed tide of the ballroom floor, the guests settle themselves to watch Will Rogers unwrap a stick of gum and put it in his mouth. When he first began to go about in society, he tells them, he had a lot of trouble finding out which were the servants and which the gentlemen. Then he found a clue-- butlers had no braid on their trousers. After that he was able to distinguish the butlers. Now his only trouble is to distinguish the gentlemen. . . .

He has become rich. He owns a huge house in Beverly Hills, near the Hollywood studios where he worked in the early Western movies, Honest Hutch, Jes' Call Me Jim, Doubling for Romeo, Fruits of Faith. He has a reputation of being one of the most closefisted members of the joyous soviet of Broadway; only his best friends know of the money he gives away anonymously to sick chorus girls, and rum-dums, and broken actors. Once he heard that members of the baseball team of a stick town he was playing were ashamed to go on the diamond because they had no uniforms; he used a week's salary to get them the best suits, bats, gloves that could be bought. A week later he played polo with the Prince of Wales. ". . .Yes, I'm one of these movie fellers but I'm not a regular one. I've been married twenty years and I still have the same wife I started out with."

Occasionally his son Jim, who is also in the movies gets letters-- human, curiously simple letters-- from the man whose barbed epistles are being launched at Mr. Coolidge. If these letters are ever published one will be able to tell more about this man, the Cherokee woman's son, whose voice whines like a lake wind in Illinois, the man who now travels over Europe, Ambassador of the U. S.