Green Sunset : Autry Hanging Up Spurs With Cash Register Jinglin’

In 1991, Forbes magazine remarked that while some entertainers were raking it in at record rates, only one was among the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual list of the super rich.

He was Orvon Gene Autry, the Singin’ Cowboy, worth an estimated $300 million. He got there, the magazine said, by investing, not by strumming his guitar. “As smart an investor as they come,” the magazine concluded.

Behind the fistfights with movie villains and the traveling rodeo shows and the hit recordings has been a shrewd businessman who, according to those around him, had an uncanny ability to recognize opportunity and how to seize it.

He was the first major movie star to recognize the potential of television and exploit it by producing and appearing in his own shows. He was the first rodeo producer to inject theatrical gimmicks such as wagon trains and dancers into the events, selling out his shows in both this country and Europe.

He bought luxury hotels, movie set ranches, flagging television and radio stations and pumped them back to life. When he needed sports programming, he bought a baseball franchise, the Los Angeles (later California) Angels.

Now he is selling most of his assets, and Thursday came the announcement of perhaps the most spectacular of the deals. Walt Disney Co. said it has agreed to buy the Angels from Autry, 25% now (for a reported $30 million) and the rest upon Autry’s death. Disney will take over management of the team as soon as the deal is signed.

As with the other sales in recent years, the Angels are being dealt away because Autry is 87 “and would like to retire and I’m 54 and would like to retire,” said wife Jackie Autry, who has, in effect, been running the team in recent years.

Also mixed into the decision are large losses--$11 million last season, a projected $12.5 million in the coming season, according to Angels sources. Stan Schneider, his longtime personal accountant, said Autry probably made money with the Angels in the long run; he bought the franchise for $2.45 million and reportedly is selling it for about $120 million.

But unlike the Autry of broadcasting and hotel management, he ran the team as many other owners did: with a desire to win a World Series rather than large profits. Once Jackie Autry took control, she said in numerous interviews that such an approach must stop.

“There were times when KMPC’s profits were carrying the Angels,” Schneider said.

“I think he endured things in baseball he wouldn’t have endured anywhere else because of his love for the game,” said Allan H. (Bud) Selig, owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and acting baseball commissioner. “He’s a very good businessman, but he really had an incredible love for baseball. It’s tough finding ownership like that anymore.”

Only the O’Malley family in Los Angeles and Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis have owned their franchises longer.

For Autry, “everything came from the entertainment dollars,” Schneider said. “Young people don’t know and a lot of people have forgotten that in the 1930s he was one of the biggest earners in the world.”

Autry, who was born in Tioga, Tex., and raised in Oklahoma, was working as a railroad station telegrapher when a passenger, entertainer Will Rogers, overheard him singing and strumming a guitar. Rogers urged him to pursue a singing career.

He first appeared on radio in 1928 and made his first recording a year later. In 1931, he wrote and recorded “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine,” which sold a phenomenal number of records for the time--about 30,000 in the first month.

When sales reached half a million two years later, Autry’s press agent and a record company executive devised an award for him that is now an industry standard: the gold record. The platinum record had to be invented for his all-time biggest hit, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

In 1934, Autry began making B-movie Westerns and serials. In 1935 he made what is considered to be the first singing-cowboy movie, “Tumblin’ Tumbleweed,” and from then on played only one character: Gene Autry.

Though he never emerged from the B-movie category, his popularity grew to the point that in 1940 only three actors--Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable--outranked him as a box office draw. The following year he made $600,000, the equivalent of about $6 million today.

The money went to investment, Schneider said. “Gene had a knack of being in the right place at the right time,” he said. “He just had an instinct for what would work.”

In the 1950s, it was radio stations. He bought a nearly bankrupt KMPC in Los Angeles and turned it into one of the most profitable in the nation. He bought more in Phoenix, Seattle and San Francisco, calling the chain Golden West Broadcasters.

He bought TV stations--KOOL in Phoenix and KTLA in Los Angeles--producing his own programming and playing his old movies. He also broadcast Los Angeles Dodger games on KMPC, but he bought his own baseball franchise when the Dodgers moved to another radio station.

Along the way he bought hotels--the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, the Continental in Los Angeles, the Ocotillo Lodge and the Autry in Palm Springs.

“Just look at the Angels and you know that he knows how to market things,” said Rose Narba, who managed the Autry hotel until the Autrys sold it. “He’s lived by a cowboy code that’s most unique. He’s a legend, but he still believes in shaking hands. To him, that makes a deal.”

“A lot of movie stars think they’re big-assed birds, but Gene always used to talk to the cowboys,” said Frank Bogart, former Palm Springs mayor and one of Autry’s rodeo cowboys. “He was always just a good old boy. Whenever he comes down here, he calls up and we have lunch. And all he wants to talk about are the old cowboys.”

Virtually all of Autry’s businesses are being sold, to minimize inheritance taxes and to lessen the business load, Schneider said.

“It was a nice empire, wasn’t it,” he said.

Times staff writers Greg Johnson and Mike DiGiovanna contributed to this report.

* ENTER DISNEY: How the deal came together. A1

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Angels in the Back Lot

Inking The Deal

How the Disney-Angels deal came about:

1990:

* Disenchantment: Gene and Jackie Autry sour on baseball after a 32-day lockout shortens spring training and causes the season to start a week late.

* Disney approached: Jackie Autry talks with Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael D. Eisner about purchasing the Angels.

* Bad timing: Eisner declines, says timing is off.

1994:

* Strike: Angels lose $11 million after strike shortens season.

1995:

* Sales talk: Peter Ueberroth emerges as potential purchaser of minority stake in the Angels but is unwilling to assume strike losses.

* Enter Disney: Jackie Autry meets with Eisner on May 14.

* Deal signed: Disney and Autrys sign completed deal on May 18.

Autry’s Holdings

Former singing cowboy Gene Autry, 87, has parlayed a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at $315 million from holdings in broadcasting and ownership of the Angels. Some of Autry’s business ventures:

* Golden West Broadcasters, Which at one time owned eight radio and two television stations--was born in 1952 with the purchase of KMPC radio for $800,000. Autry sold the station for a reported $18 million in 1994. Other holdings include KSCA-FM, formerly KLIT-FM, and KUTE-FM, for which Autry paid $15 million in 1984.

* Autry moved into television with the purchase of KTLA Channel 5 for 12 million in 1964. The station was sold to Tribune Broadcasting in 1982 for 245 million.

* Autry purchased the California Angels for $2.5 million in 1960. The team is estimated to be worth $120 million today. He agreed this week to sell a 25% interest in the Angels to Walt Disney Co. The majority interest will not be sold until after his death.

Team Disney

If the partial sale is approved by major league baseball owners, the Angels will take their place among Disney’s growing sports holdings, which include:

The Mighty Ducks, a National Hockey League franchise whose worth was recently pegged at $108 million, second-highest in the league.

A 90,000-square-foot community ice center being constructed in Anaheim.

A 1.1-mile oval track at Disney World in Florida, scheduled to be the site for an Indianapolis 500-style car race in January.

A 100-acre international amateur sports center under construction at Disney World that will be home to the Amateur Athletic Union and include a 7,500-seat stadium, field house, tennis arena and training and fitness facilities.

Sources: Times reports, wire reports, Walt Disney Co. Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM, JANICE JONES and DAVID NEIMAN / Los Angeles Times