The Cowboy and his Elephant (7 page)

A
cowboy was judged above all else on the horses he kept, and the thirty or so in Bob’s barn were deemed exceptional. His breed was the quarter horse, “America’s horse,” it was
called, the first one native to the United States, with bloodlines that had been mixed with several European breeds. Andalusians from Spain, Arabians from the Middle East, or pure English or European horses held no particular allure for Bob. He said that he was an American, and his horses would be American as well. Generations of cowboys had admired, and even sung, the quarter horse’s virtues. Heavily muscled for endurance, and with compact bodies and calm dispositions of use around cattle, they ran short distances faster than any other horse, and easily kept pace with the short, erratic bursts of speed common to cattle. They had a so-called cow sense, with which they anticipated the reactions of cattle.

Cows resisted separation from their own, and moved in tight groups like schools of fish. To “cut” one from its herd was hard, exhausting, and violent work that called for a close “coordination between horse and cowboy. Bob and his cutting horses worked cattle with balletic grace. He commanded his mount with a slight pressure of his thighs, or spurs, or a light touch of the reins. The horse’s eyes never moved from the cow. By feinting with its head it made the cow commit itself to a direction; then the horse exploited that opening to its advantage, and the job was done.

Bob trained his own T Cross horses, from “breaking” them to the saddle to training them to perform as champions. Over the years he acquired his own methods of making the horses do what he asked of them. He began by following one simple rule: Never punish a horse.

He used carrots instead. “You get more out of anything alive with a carrot than with a stick,” he said. He recalled how Colonel Lapham at the Flying L came out of the house each morning to greet his horses with a pocketful of carrots. “Every living thing in nature responds to kindness,” Bob said.

At the start of the day out by the barn, he whistled and held a fresh carrot up for the horses in the pasture to see. They flared their ears and raced to him. He made the horses anxious to do what he wanted them to. He trained horses to the saddle by using common “horse” sense, starting in a pen.

He entered with a saddle over his arm, a hackamore, and a short rope to lead the horse. The horse was usually skittish and shy. Its eyes bulged, and it sought out the corners of the corral. Bob walked like a man with nothing to do. He talked softly, touched the horse, and at the moment when the horse relaxed, he placed a saddle on its back and ran a lead rope through the stirrups and under its belly. Then he held the horse on long reins. If the horse ran off, Bob pulled its head around until it stopped. He had control, giving voice commands and hand signals; he turned the horse to the right and to the left, and lunged it around him. This was all groundwork that paid off when it came to mounting the horse’s back. Bob got up halfway in the stirrup and talked to the horse, and then swung his leg over and sat down. He repeated that four or five times. The horse understood what he was doing; there were no surprises. The horse started walking alongside another horse and rider, with the young
horse’s head usually forced with a rope up to the horn of the rider’s saddle. If the horse reared and tried to run, it could not go far. The rope was loosened, and Bob took the reins and rode it around the corral. Now when he gave a command, the horse obliged.

“Common sense,” he said.

Outside a rodeo ring, Bob did not understand the logic of the bucking bronco. He hated getting bucked off a horse: The ground was hard, and as he grew older it got harder. “That bucking that they used to do just always seemed stupid to me,” he said. “It was cruel and stupid, because once a horse knows he can buck you off, you’ve got a problem. Teach him a good habit that you don’t have to undo instead.”

Bob allowed his horses to develop their own personalities and react in their own ways to the world around them.

“Every horse is built differently in its muscle and bones,” he said. “So why shouldn’t every horse move different?”

Big Bob, his champion quarter horse, had a character that was full of surprises. One day on Big Bob, down near a waterhole in a pasture, with two dogs along for company, Bob rode up to a steep bank. He was dozing in the sun. Suddenly Big Bob shot up the bank. With an explosion of energy he turned 180 degrees, and Bob only had time to catch the saddle horn to stay on. He knew better than to doze on Big Bob, so he didn’t blame the horse at all.

Another time he was riding Big Bob, and his cowboys were pushing cattle toward him. He did not see an all-white
heifer that popped over the bank “like a ghost.” He was sitting lazily on Bob one moment, and the next, he says, “I was sittin’ in the air ahold of my reins.” He smiled at the memory. “That’s Big Bob. He’s grabby-assed. It comes to him naturally. His surrogate mother was goofy.” And then he adds, “But his mother was a real genuine beauty.”

B
ob went into ranching as much to be with his children as to be with the animals. The family lived in a house that cost only thirteen thousand dollars to build. The grandeur of its setting, with the Rockies in the distance, gentle hills between, here and there covered in spring with blankets of wildflowers and in winters with sheets of whitest snow, made the house, in Bob’s eyes, into a mansion. With the animals around them, Bob and his family lived together, cooked, ate, and slept, played, cried, and laughed; got sick and recovered, all within each other’s sight, sound, and reach. When the children were not attending school, they were on horseback with their father and often with their mother, as Bob says, “cowboyin’.”

“We worked together. We didn’t have to make things up to keep us together as a family. We were fixing fences, working the cattle, doing all sorts of general ranch work, mostly around the animals; the kids helped with branding, gathering, and doctoring of the cattle. You could say I kinda grew up with my kids. Jane was a mother and homemaker. Twenty years went by, and she didn’t put the same meal on the table twice. She made a career out of it. We were lucky.”

From time to time, early in the mornings, the family took to the saddle and rode to a favorite wateringhole that was stocked with trout. They threw in their lines and caught breakfast, which they cooked in a skillet over a campfire. At those times Bob inspired his children with simple, homespun truths and lessons to live by:

Always keep your word.

A gentleman never insults anyone by mistake.

Never tell a lie, then you don’t have to worry about what you said.

Don’t look for trouble, but if you get into a fight, make sure you win it.

Fun is the main thing.

Don’t complain. Complaining is what quitters do.

If a man doesn’t respect a woman enough to clean up his mouth, he doesn’t respect himself.

Be kind to children, old folks, and animals.

The whole family took part in the spring roundup, roping the calves, branding them, injecting them to keep them healthy, then setting them back with their mothers. The work was hard, and the days were long. They ate around campfires and slept under the stars.

“The kids and me,” Bob says, “we worked out our problems together, ropin’ and brandin’ and ridin’, always around the animals. On a ranch you eat together, you work together, and play together. You’re happy and sad as a
unit, and it’s like the modern psychologists say, ‘quality time.’ Hell, I knew that they’d be up and out soon enough. They’d be gone, and then it’s lost. It’s lost forever and for all time.”

T
he boyhood fantasy of the mythic cowboy was never meant to be real. But for Bob it became even more real than for most other cowboys of his generation, when one bright spring day, when he was pushing quarter horses from the pasture toward the corral, he saw strangers arrive in cars near the barn. He had been expecting a visit from advertising agency men from Chicago—someone who knew Bob in Denver had recommended the use of Bob’s ranch as a background for a series of still photos that the agency was shooting for Marlboro cigarettes.

Bob watched from a distance as a cowboy model took his duds out of a trunk and prepared to change. He had a bright, new neckerchief and new jeans, a shirt with ironed creases, and shined boots that were new out of a Lucchese box. Riding nearer, Bob saw that the model’s complexion was strictly indoor. He carried a little suitcase for makeup that he applied with a brush.

“Howdy!” Bob greeted him from horseback.

Meanwhile, another man hurried around the corner of the barn and introduced himself as Neil McBain, from Chicago’s Leo Burnett Advertising Agency, which had created the “Marlboro Man.” He put out his hand as Bob dismounted. He praised the beauty of Bob’s T Cross. The
setting would help create the right mood. Needlessly McBain pointed to Pike’s Peak to the West and the foothills of the Rockies reflecting light and shadow. The skies lit up the color of amber.

“So you figure on what?” Bob asked him.

“Shooting some photos of the cowboy here, with the barns and horses and the wildflowers in the fields, if that’s okay with you.”

“Be my guest,” said Bob.

Following the direction of Bob’s gaze, McBain said, “He’s the model.” He knew how painfully obvious he was to a real cowboy: The man was too handsome to be real. McBain had sought to create a cowboy out of a trunk, and clearly he had failed.

It was not the clothes, or even the handsomeness of the professional model, that bothered him. A real cowboy had a connection to the earth and to life that only a cowboy knew. When a real cowboy rode a horse, he belonged there, and a real cowboy was as one with the animals he rode and roped. No one had thought before of using a real cowboy. It just hadn’t occurred to anyone in the advertising world. Models were still the standard. But the real cowboy was the figure McBain was looking for and patterning his models after.

No makeup and costuming could ever create the real cowboy’s look either. For instance, the lines around Bob’s eyes were byproducts of years under the sun and in the wind, staring out over vast open spaces. In truth, Bob was what McBain was looking for. He was the real thing who did not have to look the part: The part was supposed to look like him.

Bob’s neighbor, fellow rancher, and friend Ordell Larsen joined Bob that morning on the corral fence, watching the advertising agency’s Marlboro Man take shape. Bob remembers, “T
his
was the Marlboro Man! He got rigged out from clothes in that damn trunk. I held his horse for him while he mounted. Up in the saddle he looked like a monkey on a football.”

McBain told the model to dismount: Nothing looked right. He asked him to disrobe. “Your clothes are too clean,” he told him. He looked over at Bob. “Hell, you’re already dirty, Mr. Norris. Let’s use you instead. What do you say?”

Bob grinned. “I’ll try anything once,” he told McBain, and he mounted up on a stout horse named Buck. The advertising pictures were taken, and when the day ended, the photographer counted hundreds of shots of Bob and Buck together, posing in fields of wildflowers.

Larsen called out when they had finished, “Norris, if you think they’re gonna
use
that film of you, you’re nuts.”

Bob said, “You’re probably right.”

Months went by. Then his youngest son, Bobby, called home. “Dad, have you seen the new
Life
magazine?”

“Nope,” said Bob. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, get it! You and Buck are on the back.”

For the next twelve years, Marlboro paid Bob pretty much to be himself. In the commercials, as in his real life, he rescued stranded calves and worked the cows. He rode his own horse through fields of snow on camera and off, and through meadows of wildflowers in spring and during the
Marlboro shoots. He stopped to give his horses a drink by picturesque waterfalls and streams, snowshoed through drifts with a newborn over the saddlehorn. He threw bales of hay out of helicopter doors to snowbound cattle, under the gaze of the camera’s eye. With a lariat in his hand he rode down wild horses and longhorn cows. He was the American cowpoke in the minds of a million magazine readers and TV viewers. Best of all, he was real.

H
is hat was his symbol, a beautiful 20X Resistol brand hat. He was never pictured without it. Then, one night at dinner in Vail, Colorado, at the Red Lion Restaurant, after the bill was paid and Bob went to the coat-check booth to retrieve his hat and coat, the hat was gone.

“Where’s my hat?” he asked the coat-check woman.

“Someone took it,” she replied.

Bob was holding the claim ticket.

“Some man took it,” she explained. “He knew you were the Marlboro Man. He wanted your hat.”

“Do you know who he was?”

She gave him a name. He was a complete stranger.

Bob discovered that the man worked in Denver, and he went to his office the next day.

A secretary was sitting behind her desk. Bob asked if her boss was in.

“Yes, but he’s busy.”

“No, he’s not.”

“You can’t go in there!”

Bob opened the inner office door. The man was behind his desk. Bob’s hat was hanging on a coatrack across the room. He walked in, took his hat, and put it on his head. He looked at the man and said, “Don’t say anything.”

It was his Marlboro hat, and as such it was important to him as the symbol of who he was. He did not like it stolen, whatever it was. The shock of recognition came when he asked himself, Am I the Marlboro Man, or am I who I am first and foremost? Obviously the hat thief had taken him for an icon, and that was not who he thought himself to be. But the question remained.

O
ne morning that spring he opened the
Gazette Telegraph
to learn that the company his granduncle had started was in trouble. Bob knew how oilmen had joked for years that Texaco couldn’t find oil at a gas station. The company owned hardly any reserves. So Texaco had sought to buy Getty Oil, which was awash in crude still in the ground. But there was one problem with the purchase/sale: Getty was already promised to another buyer, Pennzoil, which promptly sued Texaco for “tortious interference.” A Texas judge levied a fine of $11 billion in damages against Texaco, which could only pay by selling itself off in little pieces, and that meant the end of Texaco forever. That judgment started the OK Corral of Chapter XIs—the biggest bankruptcy in history—and the beginning of Bob’s reluctant career in high finance.