A TRIBUTE TO

Shari Lewis

A TRIBUTE TO

Gene Autry

Gene Autry, U.S. Cowboy Movie Hero, Dead At 91 Singing Cowboy Gene Autry Dead at Age 91 Gene Autry, the original singing cowboy who transformed a film and recording career into a vast business empire, died Friday at his home after a long battle with lymphoma, a form of cancer at age 91. He had been bedridden for a month before his death. Autry, the son of a Texas horse trader, began his career as "Oklahoma's Yodeling Cowboy" in 1929 and went on to record some of America's most popular songs including "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Back in the Saddle Again." "Rudolph," recorded on a whim in 1949, has sold more than 30 million copies and is the second biggest selling Christmas song behind Bing Crosby's "White Christmas." Autry also rode his horse, Champion, in about 90 movies and became one of the biggest box office draws in the 1930s and 1940s. The profits from his ventures allowed him to buy the California Angels baseball team in 1960. Although he spent millions buying the best players, the club never fulfilled his dream of winning the World Series. In 1996, Autry sold 25 percent of the team to the Walt Disney Co. in a deal which also gave Disney the operating rights to the franchise. He was born Orvon Gene Autry in Tioga, Texas, on Sept. 29, 1907. After a nomadic childhood, at the age of 17 he settled with his family in Oklahoma where he learned to ride and rope. Soon afterward, he went to work as a radio telegrapher. "When things got slow, I kept a little old guitar around that I would strum on," he once told a reporter. "One night this farmer-looking guy with glasses on the tip of his nose came into the office and gave me some pages to send. Then he spotted the guitar. 'You play that?' he asked. 'Some,' I told him. 'Like to hear you,' he said." Autry played a couple of songs and the visitor, famed Oklahoma humorist Will Rogers, said: "Hey, you do all right. You ought to get yourself a job on the radio." Autry took his advice and made his first records in 1929. Later he was invited to appear on the National Barn Dance, a popular country music program, and recorded a million-selling country tune called "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine," written with an old friend, Jimmy Long. On his way to Chicago in 1932 he met Long's niece, Ina Mae Spivey, a 20-year-old music student. Three months and four dates later Autry proposed, and they were married. In 1934 the Autrys moved to Hollywood. Westerns were losing popularity and the studios were looking for someone to keep the genre alive. Autry stepped in; three years later he was the top Western star at the box office for Republic studios, a title he held for six years. "I honestly never considered myself an actor," he said later. "I was more of a personality." Perhaps because he had little faith in his own talent, he became a shrewd businessman. He had taken a correspondence course in accounting and when he broke into show business he made it a point to check the ticket window receipts himself. In 1940, he was the fourth biggest box-office attraction behind Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. In 1941 he was grossing more than $600,000 a year from records, personal appearances, endorsements and films. But in July 1942, at the age of 34, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and his income dropped to $135 a month as a sergeant. He was allowed to wear cowboy boots with his uniform, but otherwise was treated as an ordinary G.I. Flying cargo missions in the Far East, he realized the royalties from songs and endorsements would one day dry up, and he decided to make business a full-time pursuit. His first major acquisition came in 1948, when he bought a radio station in Phoenix. That purchase became the cornerstone of a financial empire that at one point included eight other radio stations, a Los Angeles television station, a Palm Springs hotel, a 20,000-acre cattle ranch in Arizona and the California Angels baseball team. He had his own radio show on the CBS network from 1940 to 1957 and enjoyed a friendly rivalry with America's other great singing cowboy, Roy Rogers, who died in July. He also was the first major film star to have his own TV series, "The Gene Autry Show," which began in 1950. He stopped performing in 1964, saying he "stopped making films when they started making the horses taller." There were rumors that he drank heavily. In a 1978 autobiography, he confronted the issue. "Without realizing it," he wrote, "I had grown dependent on liquor to relax. Drinking was a way to celebrate the end of a day or a deal.... It's a hard habit to resist and, after a while, you really don't want to resist." He said his drinking never interfered with his work. When the Angels became available in 1960, Autry moved with customary speed and confidence. The opportunity came about when Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley pulled his team's game broadcasts off Autry's radio station, KMPC, complaining of poor audio quality. Autry immediately tried to tie up radio rights to the American League's California expansion team and found that the prospective owners of the new club had soured on the deal. Three days later he produced a letter of credit for $1.5 million and became the owner.

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