A Long Walk in Will Rogers’ Shoes

To Donna Raymond, head of docents at Will Rogers State Historic Park, the moment that actor James Whitmore transforms himself into folk hero Rogers is a stunning theatrical display.

Raymond has a practiced eye, having spent hundreds of hours showing park visitors around the Pacific Palisades house preserved just as the joke-spinning philosopher left it when he died in an Alaska plane crash in 1935.

“He walks out on stage and turns his back to the audience,” she says of Whitmore. “And when he turns around, there is Will. There’s no mistaking it’s him. It kind of gives you cold shivers. He’s got the walk down, got the gum going.”

Whitmore has polished the one-man role of “Will Rogers’ U.S.A.” during hundreds of performances for 26 years--more than half his 49 years in show business. Now the time has come, he said, to slow his hectic pace. He is not quite ready to retire as Will but, counting his April 13 date at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza, he has booked only four more performances.

“And then it’s a wrap for a while,” he said last week at his Malibu home, which overlooks the Pacific. “I’m not touring anymore; the old engine won’t take it.” The 74-year-old actor was relaxing poolside after a five-week engagement as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in “The Magnificent Yankee” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

It’s good to be back home, he said. “I’m kind of tired. I’ve got 15 grandchildren and the days are dwindling down now. I want to spend some quality time with the family.”

Two of his clan are in show business: a son, television director and actor James Whitmore Jr. of Thousand Oaks, and a sister, Sally Thalman, a retired motion picture lingerie designer who recently moved to Southern California from Florida. Whitmore has two other sons and two stepdaughters.

He will have plenty of family activities to engage him while he sits back and waits for whatever he thinks is his next good project. “I have no plans to retire,” he added. “As Will Rogers said, the only plan I have is no plan. I want to do a little fishing.”

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Whitmore says he will put away his fishing pole only to continue his 15-year stint as TV spokesman for Miracle-Gro plant food. Other than that, he disdains the thought of stepping before a camera.

“I have no more movie work coming up and I don’t want it, to tell you the truth,” said the big-boned actor whose booming baritone is as famous as his chiseled face.

If he holds true to his promise, he will have concluded a distinguished film career. Whitmore came to Hollywood in 1949, earning a supporting-actor Golden Globe Award and Oscar nomination in his second screen role as a World War II GI in “Battleground.”

He followed with leading or supporting roles in such popular films as “Them,” “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” “Kiss Me Kate” and “Planet of the Apes.” He garnered a best-actor Oscar nomination for his 1975 portrayal of President Truman in the one-man show, “Give ‘em Hell, Harry.”

After a compelling performance as the judge in the 1987 courtroom drama “Nuts,” he was absent from the screen for seven years to concentrate on the theater. When he returned to film in 1994, he won critical praise for the sensitive portrayal of Brooks, a convict-librarian in “The Shawshank Redemption.”

“It was a dandy,” he recalled of the part. “When you start out eating a worm and then you kill yourself,” you can’t ask for a better role, he said. “But the ball game is the film, and that was an extraordinary film. It was about people you cared about. You rooted for them.”

Outside of his film work, Whitmore’s craggy features are most vividly etched in the public’s mind from his role in “Will Rogers’ U.S.A.” The two-hour show captures the cowboy philosopher’s persona as national court jester, deflator of big egos and purveyor of cultural and political wisdom.

Whitmore has taken the show all over the country. Scripted entirely from Rogers’ words by Rogers scholars Bryan B. and Frances N. Sterling of New York, it strikes responsive chords everywhere. Once in Las Vegas, Whitmore recalled, local cowboys chimed in from the footlights: “You tell ‘em, Will.”

Audiences are won over by Rogers’ timeless insight and Whitmore’s vivid portrayal. Three of those fans--Will’s children--could have been Whitmore’s severest critics. Will’s daughter, Mary, caught every performance of an engagement in San Francisco shortly before her death, Whitmore recalls. And when her brother, the late Will Rogers Jr., first saw the show, he bounded on stage exclaiming: “Hey, dad! Can I borrow the car keys?”

Will’s surviving son, Jim, 80, a semiretired Bakersfield rancher who was 20 when his famous father was killed, said last week: “I can’t say that Jim looks very much like dad. I think he looked a lot more like Truman than dad, but he does deliver the lines beautifully.”

“He gets the spirit of Will Rogers, and I think that’s the message far more than a likeness,” he added.

That message is tightly bound around current events, which demonstrates Rogers’ uncanny prescience, Whitmore noted.

“We have a lot of wonderful new material on the [federal] budget. He said, ‘The budget just went up to the White House from the hill, and if you like fiction, you can read it.’ That’s exactly what’s going on today.”

One Rogers’ quip resonates hauntingly: “That Yugoslavia, they just seem to want to fight anyhow. Be a good joke on them if nobody prevented ‘em.”

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To all that, Whitmore adds a priceless realism: his memory of actually seeing Rogers on stage 62 years ago.

“I was 12 years old and dad said we’re going to go see a cowboy,” Whitmore recalled. “I was terribly disappointed. He came out in a blue serge suit with a newspaper. I wanted a cowboy and the guy came out looking like a bank president.”

Decades later, Whitmore had another close encounter with Rogers--this time in spirit only--when, on the 60th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Rogers and aviation pioneer Wiley Post Jr., he visited the site of the tragedy at remote Point Barrow, Alaska.

“It’s really a desolate place,” he said. “It was a moving experience to know he died up there all alone, with only his friend.”

Whitmore was accompanied by a couple of friends of his own, the writer Bryan Sterling and Joseph H. Carter, president of the Will Rogers Memorial and Birthplace in Claremore, Okla., where tapes of Whitmore’s performances are continually played in one of the museum galleries.

“Whitmore really brings Will Rogers to life,” said Carter. “You’ll leave knowing the real Will Rogers. This is something that American theater is going to talk about for many, many years.”

For Whitmore, Rogers will always represent more than the voice of America, something much more universal.

Rogers “was like Sholom Aleichem and those truth-tellers who had humor about them,” he said, drawing a parallel with the Russian author known for his Yiddish stories, one of which inspired the play, “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“Twain was another one,” Whitmore continued. “People love it because people down deep--deep, deep, deep, deep down--way down deep so they don’t even know it, they know that life is kind of funny. But, we’re all idiots in our own strange way.”

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Will Rogers’ U.S.A.,” starring James Whitmore.

* WHERE: Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza Auditorium, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday.

* HOW MUCH: $18, $29 and $40.

* CALL: 449-2787.