Read Online The Cowboy and his Elephant by Malcolm MacPherson - Free Book Online Page A

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 theMarlboro 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