REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:


CLIFFORD IRVING – Tom Mix and Pancho Villa: A Romance of the Mexican Revolution. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1982; paperback, 1984.

   After Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show passed through El Paso I learned to twirl a ketch rope, and when I gave up my dream of becoming an actor, I couldn’t decide whether I’d be a Texas Ranger or a champion rodeo rider. My father hoped I’d go into the cold-body business with him, my mother thought insurance would be a nice trade, but I confounded everybody by quitting school at the age of seventeen, tucking my Shakespeare into my bedroll and hightailing it over to the Brazos, where I landed a job as wrangler in a cow camp. I was one of five healthy children, not the brightest and surely not the prettiest, so no one missed me to the point of grief … or else they guessed I was a quitter and would come back in my own sweet time.

   So begins the rip-snorting adventure tale told in the first person by Tom Mix about his early days and his adventures riding side by side with Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa in the days of the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the 20th Centruy. And it should come as no surprise that this tall tale of a “memoir” should sound authentic since it is penned by the infamous Clifford Irving whose Howard Hughes memoir was one of the great literary hoaxes of all time.

   It hardly needs to be said this “memoir” is no more authentic than most of its subjects popular Westerns, but must be added it is every bit as entertaining as the best of them, as Tom Mix, at trails end, shortly before the tragic accident that ended his legendary (in more senses than one) life sits down to recall the best and happiest time of his checkered career.

   Seeking an old friend in Juarez young Tom falls in with Villa, and soon is hypnotized by the revolutionary:

   â€œAnd how many men do you have in your own army, chief?”

   â€œFive here. That’s counting you and me. Four waiting for me across the river in El Paso. That’s … let’s see …” He counted rapidly on his fingers.

   â€œThat’s nine.”

   â€œThat’s all? I thought you already had an army!”

   â€œI’ll get one.” “Nine men?” “With nine men, loyal and brave, I can recruit nine thousand more. Then I’ll need horses for them to ride, trains for them to travel on, food for them to eat, rifles for them to shoot and bullets to put into the rifles.”

   A pop-eyed smile lit up his face. “None of this will be very difficult. The people know me. They’ll follow me. Look how easily I convinced you to do it, and you’re a gringo.” His eyes grew a shade more solemn. “I need men like you, Tomás. You’re young, but you’re clever and you want to learn. Moreover, as Candelario said, you’re lucky. Once we have a real army, you’ll have the rank of captain. If I forget, remind me.”

   And young Tom is swept up, and who wouldn’t be, in dreams of revolution and adventure.

   Adventure being the key word. Adventure in the grand and picaresque sense of the word, adventure full of character building, painful realizations, fast horses, flying bullets, dead enemies, lost friends, beautiful senoritas Rosa, Eliza, and one of his own race. Hannah, treachery, Hemingwayesque discussions of passion, revolution, death, and manhood (“If your obligations are the same as your desires, you’re a lucky man. You can be whole.”), all kept moving by colorful and rich portraits of Mexico and the border in those wild days.

   The ending, as our hero rides into a different kind of sunset has a beauty all its own:

   A bloody ball of sun dipped toward the mountains that tumbled about on the horizon in the direction of Sonora.

   To Sonora …

   To Celaya …

   To Torreón, again …

   To Hollywood …

   The desert lay drowned in rich, soft mist. Somewhere, a coyote howled. The dead slept in the slowly cooling earth of Mexico. Goodbye, my love. What the hell, I thought. The defeats are also battles. Goodbye, my youth — and goodbye. Chihuahua. I flicked a rein. The horse turned west. I rode off into the sunset, singing a mournful tune, and became a movie cowboy.

    Tom Mix and Pancho Villa is a big technicolor historical fantasy, all vistas and gun battles, beautiful women, heroic men, and hard riding against a rich backdrop of a time not so very far away. I confess it is one of my favorite books, rich in imagination and vivid action and characters, not, perhaps, as flawed as their real life counterparts, or at least in the same ways, but beautifully painted images as glorious in their own ways as their cinematic adventures.