The Cowboy in the Enormous Hat—Tom Mix

                                The greatest Western movie hero and idol--Tom Mix.

 

Tom Mix was big in every way.  Bigger than you can imagine.  A handsome, barrel chested man.  The biggest star.  The biggest hero to a generation or two of boys.  As big as the enormous hats he wore.  He even died in a big, flashy way speeding down an Arizona highway in a fancy open Cord 812 Phaeton on October 13, 1940 at just 60 years of age.

Thomas Hezekiah Mix was born January 6, 1880 in Mix Run, Pennsylvania where his family, as the place name infers, had deep roots.  It was a small, unincorporated village in the remote north central part of the state near what became the Elk State Forest.  His father was a stable master and the boy grew up around horses and was an unmatched rider by his early teens.

He also was enamored of the small traveling circus shows that came through town.  He dreamed of running away to join the circus and practiced acts in the barn—including using his sister as a target for knife throwing.  That got him a good whipping from his father.

Restless and eager for real adventure. Mix rushed to enlist in the Army for the Spanish American War under the name Thomas Edwin Mix—he was glad to lose Hezekiah—just the first of many reinventions.  He never saw action in that brief war, but did become a sergeant of artillery serving in the Philippines in 1900-’01 although he was never actually deployed against the Filipino insurrectionists.

Back stateside he met a young woman, Grace I. Allin and married her while on furlough in July 1902.  He never returned to duty and was officially listed as a deserter that November.  Desertion from the peacetime Army was not uncommon in those days and unless the AWOL soldier was nabbed close to base or picked up by police somewhere on other charges the military did not have the resources to pursue arrests.  Mix often referred to his Army service in later years, including allowing people to assume that he was in Cuba, perhaps even as a Rough Rider and some people in the Army must have been aware of his status as he rose to fame.  But no action was ever taken against him and the Army afforded him a veteran’s funeral with full honors.  The revelation of his status as a deserter came only when serious biographers began to research his purposefully murky early years.

Mix’s marriage didn’t last as long as his enlistment.  It was annulled in less than a year, probably because he had run off to Oklahoma to become a cowboy.  A master horseman already and marksman with both a rifle and a handgun as a result of a youth spent roaming the Pennsylvania woods and as soldier, he slid as effortlessly into his new identity as a Colt .44 into a well-oiled holster.  In no time at all he was a top hand with a growing reputation.  But he also was something of a showman from the beginning, splitting time between real ranch work and playing the cowboy for a young nation still enthralled with tales of the West.  In 1903 he turned up as drum major of the Oklahoma Cavalry Band, at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

The next year he was back in Oklahoma in the dual roles of bartender and Town Marshall of Dewey.  This short stint as a part time lawman would eventually loom much larger in the legend he created about himself.

Always the lady’s man, Mix married again 1905 to Kitty Jewel Perinne of whom little is known but whose name makes the imagination dance.  That marriage, too, fizzled in divorce after a year.  A certain pattern in domestic relationships was beginning to emerge.

The same year as his marriage Mix turned up in a troop of 50 cowboy riders led by the legendary marshal of Deadwood and Rough Rider Captain Seth Bullock in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.  Many of the other riders were also former Rough Riders, leading many to conclude that Mix was as well—an assumption he never did anything to disclaim.

By 1906 Mix was working on the biggest and most famous of all Oklahoma ranches, the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch.  The sprawling ranch, which bred horses as well as raising cattle, employed hundreds of cowboys.  One of the wranglers was a roping wonder named Will Rogers. 

After the spring round-up hands on the ranch traditionally conducted their own cowboy contests—rodeos they would come to be called—displaying riding, roping, and shooting skills.  Up in Cheyenne, Wyoming they had already discovered that such cowboy games were great draws for tourists whose appetite for cowboy adventure had been whetted by Buffalo Bill Cody and other wild west show troupes.   The 101 outfit had also been contracted to provide stock to those shows and to the rodeos springing up around the west.  Their own private competition was itself opened to the public and began to draw crowds.  The Miller Bros launched their own touring 101 Ranch Wild West Show in 1906. And Tom Mix was, from the beginning the star. 

Tom Mix, second from left, with members of the wild west show troupe he assembled for the 1909 Alaska-Youkon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. He had plans to tour with the show but persistent rain in Seattle kept down receipts and his first independent circus failed.

He also competed in other rodeos and in another type of completion called cowboy games where riding and shooting events were combined.  He was named national champion in those in Prescott, Arizona in 1909, and Canyon City, Colorado in 1910.  In the meantime he had married yet again, this time to horsewoman Olive Stokes on January 10, 1909 in Medora, North Dakota.  Together they appeared in other shows including the Widerman Show in Amarillo, Texas, Seattle’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and Will A. Dickey’s Circle D Ranch.  His childhood dreams of becoming a circus star were folding into his life as a cowboy

Mix was back at the 101 Ranch in 1910 when the Selig Polyscope Company, an early motion picture studio, contracted with the Miller Bros to provide stock and performers for a series of one reel films. 

Westerns were already a hot commodity in the fledgling film industry.  The first American movie with a plot, the 12 minute long Great Train Robbery in 1903 set the stage for a flood of oaters. One of the leading actors in that film, Bronco Billy Anderson became the first movie star that the public knew by name and was by then producing, directing, and staring in popular westerns at Essenay Studios in Chicago.

Mix first appeared as part of the ensemble in a short Selig film, The Cowboy Millionaire in 1909.  The following year he was featured in a sort of documentary called Ranch Life in the Great Southwest which showed off his prodigious skills as a rider, roper, and rough and tumble cowpoke.  The movie was Selig’s biggest hit to date.

In no time Mix was not only being billed as the star, he was writing and even directing his own films, which introduced elements of comedy and romance to the action mix.  Subsequent films were not shot on the 101 ranch but at the Selig studios in the Edendale district of Los Angeles and later on western sets built at Las Vegas, New Mexico. 

                                Mix with Selig co-star and third wife Victoria Forde.

In a few short years Mix made over 100 mostly single reel shorts for Selig, and some two reelers late in the association as the single reel short fell out of favor for dramatic films.  Beautiful teenage actress Victoria Forde became his favorite leading lady and, inevitably, his lover.  After 10 years with Olivia, he divorced her and married Forde the following year.  Mix now had three ex-wives and a daughter, Ruth, born in 1912, who he had to support as well as a current one—a monetary burden that both drained him and made him ambitious for fat paychecks.

As his marriage was crumbling so did Selig studios, which had few hits beyond Mix.  The company went bankrupt and William Fox bought the Edendale studios.  He also signed Mix and Forde to very generous contracts guaranteeing Mix control of his own films and a dedicated production unit.  That was in 1917.  Mix would stay with the studio until 1928 making both him and Fox wealthy beyond either’s dreams.  And in the process would redefine the film western in startling new ways.

Up until this time whatever wild plot and adventures, western films tried with greater or lesser success, for realism in costume, accouterments, and settings.  Not surprisingly.  A lot of their audience could clearly recall the “Old West” and what it looked like.  Real western heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody himself or legendary Oklahoma lawman Bill Tilghman were showing up in films.  Bronco Billy was always careful of realistic setting.

Over at Famous Players-Lasky (the future Paramount) the biggest western star of the day, a former New York stage Shakespearian actor named William S. Hart was a notorious stickler for complete authenticity in his films.

Even his own Selig pictures had mostly been rooted in the realities of ranch life.

Mix, the real cowboy, rodeo rider and circus performer had no illusions about his ability as an actor.  But he had learned a thing or two about grabbing an audience.  He knew that colorful costumes drew attention in big arenas.  Instead of dusty, worn working clothes, he now appeared in highly tailored costumes—tight trousers tucked into richly decorated high heeled cowboy boots, two pearl handled revolvers in tooled belts strapped to his hips, crisp shirts often double breasted with decorative piping around a yoke and arrowhead slit pockets, silk kerchiefs knotted at the neck.  And above all, an enormous hat.  No cowboy ever rode the range in anything like it.

Mix in an enormous hat--one many specially made for him by Stetson--and decked out in one of the fancy outfits he popularized.

About that hat…Photos of working cowboys from the 1870’s on show that they wore a wide variety of headgear.  Usually wide brimmed hats but depending on the region, personal taste, and what was available at the general store when they needed one the sombreros varied with peaked crowns or flat ones, stiff brims or floppy ones, brims curled or slouched or pushed up in front—a popular look borrowed from cavalry troopers.  Around the turn of the century cowboys on the northern part of the range began to sport what was called the Montana crease, a hat with a high crown peaked in back sloping forward with a center crease.  This became the famous ten gallon hat described in dime novels.  Along the southern border with Mexico, some Texas cowboys sported a trimmed down version of the vaquero’s sombrero with a high, round crown and wide brim turned up all around.  Mix began to wear specially made Stetsons combining both styles.  They were big, flashy hats—he wore them in white or black interchangeably.  Soon other cowboy stars like Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, and Col. Tim McCoy were wearing them. 

In a case of life imitating art, they took off with real working cowboys as well, supplanting other styles for a decade or so.  Cowboys also saved up for fancy shirts and boots to wear to town on Saturday night or to dances, going back to ordinary working clothes the rest of the week.  Even they wanted to be Tom Mix.

Mix’s films were filled with humor.  He seemed not to take himself too seriously in stark contrast to the grim probity of William S. Hart’s heroes.  And they were chock full of action from the beginning to the end, lots of chases, trick riding, fist fights, leaps from great heights, and daring-do stunts of all kinds.  And Mix did all of the stunts himself, with the camera catching him in the kind of close-ups that actors who used stunt doubles could not duplicate. 

Audiences ate it all up.  Every Fox film seemed to top the previous one.  He did six or seven films a year now, far down from the hectic pace of the Selig one reelers.  He had a budget for large casts, impressive scenery, big props like steam engines, paddle wheel river boats, epic wagon trains, mass herds of real long horns—whatever he needed.

Fox built him his own facility at the Edendale studios, a 12 acre set nick named Mixville with “… a complete frontier town, with a dusty street, hitching rails, a saloon, jail, bank, doctor’s office, surveyor’s office, and the simple frame houses typical of the early Western era.”  Also on the lot was an Indian village with tepees set against plaster mountains that looked real on film, and a whole ranch set up.  When scripts called for it Mix could shoot on location in California, Nevada, and Arizona.

Mix and Tony the Wonder Horse who became so popular that he was billed as a co-star and had his name in the title of four films.

A big part of the show was now Mix’s horse, Tony the Wonder Horse, a big handsome chestnut with a white blaze face and white stockings.  Tony could perform all manner of tricks and stunts including untying Mix’s hands, opening gates, loosening his reins, rescuing Mix from fire, jumping from one cliff to another, and running after trains.  Tony became so popular that he was sometimes co-billed with Mix and had his name in the title of three films.  His popularity inspired other equine co-stars—Ken Maynard’s Tarzan, Gene Autry’s Champion, Roy Rogers’ Trigger, Hopalong Cassidy’s Topper, and the Lone Ranger’s Silver.

In his first films at Fox Forde was his co-star and love interest.  She decided to retire and devote herself to homemaking with the coming the couple’s daughter Thomisina (Tommie) in 1922.  After that a parade of beauties took turns being rescued and swept off their feet by the hero.

As Mix’s films became more and more popular, his salary grew.  He made $4,000 a week in 1922 and just three years later Fox was glad to shell out $7,500 a week—an enormous sum at the time.  And Mix spent it as fast as he made it, always paying his share to his train of ex-wives.  He always wore his immaculate trade mark Stetsons and expensive tailored clothing, much of it western style.  He drove the latest, fastest, and most expensive cars.  He erected one of the biggest mansions in Hollywood with his own stables and an electric sign with his name on the roof.  He liked to make the rounds of nightclubs, studio parties, premiers, and film events.  He and William S. Hart, and a young filmmaker named John Ford, regularly played cards and drank with legendary lawman, gambler, and sporting man Wyatt Earp.  Mix was a pall bearer at Earp’s funeral and famously broke down and cried.

The pall bearers at Wyatt Earp's funeral included old lawmen two of Earp's surviving brothers, and William S. Hart, third from left.  A grim and shaken Tom Mix is at the far right.

When Fox refused yet another big raise, Mix let his contract there lapse in 1928.  He was tiring of movies and beginning to feel his age and the effects of accumulated injuries from years of doing his own stunts.  Joseph P. Kennedy offered him a fat contract to make films with his independent studio, Film Booking Office of America, soon to be merged into RKO.  He did his last silent films there that year.   The films also featured his first daughter Ruth. They were money makers for the small studio, but without the vast network of Fox theaters, couldn’t generate as many viewers as his earlier films.

Mix decided to quit films and return to his first love—the circus.  Ruth joined his act.  He was the headline star of the Sells-Floto Circus in the 1929, 1930 and 1931seasons, pulling down $20,000 a week—more than he ever made in pictures.

A poster for Mix's first talkie at Universal, the original version of Destry Rides Again based on a Max Brand novel.  Unlike the more famous 1939 version starring James Stewart at the same studio, Mix's film followed the story as written by Brand.

In 1931 Mix’s marriage to Victoria Forde ended, likely because of the appearance of Mabel Hubbell Ward who became wife number 5 in ’32.  The expense of yet another ex-wife lured him back to pictures when Universal offered him a contract to make talkies with complete control of his production unit.  He made nine films for Universal.  Legend has it that they were failures because Mix had a high voice.  Untrue on both counts.  All of the films were box office successes, and Mix had a fine, rich baritone voice.  He was not, however, an actor adept at reading lines and he knew it.  His performances seemed more stilted than in his silents.

Both he and his beloved horse Tony were injured.  He retired Tony and brought on Tony Jr.  But it wasn’t the same.  His own injuries were becoming painful.  Mix decided to retire from film once again and return to the circus.

Mix with a performer from the Tom Mix Circus in 1935.  The show was a success in its first year but floundered and failed under daughter Ruth's management the next year when he left on a European personal appearance tour.  

This time he toured with the Sam B. Dill Circus, which he bought out and re-named the Tom Mix Circus with Ruth, who had starred in a score of Poverty Row studio B westerns and serials herself, as his partner.  He toured with the show in 1935 and then went off on a European tour leaving Ruth in charge at home.  Without his draw, with then Depression hurting ticket sales, and the expense of a large troupe, the Tom Mix Circus failed while he was away.  Probably unfairly, he blamed his daughter causing a permanent rift between them.  When he died she was cut out of what was left of his estate.

Mix had been approached several times to do his own radio show.  But the money offered was far less than he could make doing either film or circus.  Finally Ralston Purina offered him a deal for a radio series built around his name and character, but in which he would not have to perform.  Tom Mix would be played by a series of actors during the show’s long run from 1933 to ’51.  Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters starred Artells Dickson, Jack Holden from 1937, Russell Thorsen  in the early ‘40s, and Joe “Curley” Bradley from ’44 to the end of the series.  Country comedian and story teller George Gobel was one of the supporting players.

Ralston also issued a highly popular series of Tom Mix comic books and featured his image on cereal boxes.  Through the radio show, comics, and in the early ‘50’s television airings of his old movies including his silent films new generations continued to idolize Mix even after his death.

Tom Mix's last film appearance--a serial for Poverty Row Mascott Studios.

Faced with big bills from the collapse of the circus, Mix was lured back to movies one more time to do a 15 episode serial, The Miracle Rider for tiny Poverty Row studio Mascot Pictures.  The studio paid him $40,000 for just four weeks of work.  It paid off for them.  They grossed over $1 million from the Saturday matinee nickels and dimes of a new generation of adoring fans.  It was Mix’s last film appearance.

Mix spent his last years making personal appearances around the U.S. and spending money he no longer could replace.

On October 4, 1940 Mix had been larking around Arizona.  He stopped to visit an old pal, Pima County Sheriff Ed Nichols in Tucson.  Later he stopped by the Oracle Junction Inn, a saloon and casino where he had a few drinks and called his agent to enquire about future bookings.  Then it was off to Phoenix.  He was speeding down State Route 79 at an estimated 80 miles an hour when he came upon a bridge that had been washed away by a flash flood.  He slammed on the breaks skidding on the loose gravel.  An aluminum suitcase stuffed with money, traveler’s checks and jewelry tore loose from the luggage rack on the trunk behind him and slammed into Mix’s head, shattering his skull.  The car turned over and slid into the dry arroyo but he was already dead.

Mix's damaged Cord after the fatal accident.  It was fully restored and is still displayed at auto shows.

After an elaborate Hollywood funeral with full military honors, Mix was laid to rest in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.  Despite earning over $6 million in his movie career he left only a few thousand dollars—and a lot of debt in his estate.  His wife, ex-wife Victoria Forde, and daughter Thomisina each received small bequests.

Tony Jr. out lived his master, but died exactly two years later to the day.

Mix was the inspiration of songs, and literature.  Darryl Ponicsan wrote a cult favorite novel, Tom Mix Died for Your Sins.  Hoaxer Clifford Irving imagined Mix joining the Mexican Revolution Tom Mix and Pancho Villa.    Philip José Farmer made him a leading character as Jack London’s traveling companion in two of his Riverworld science fiction novels. 

James Gardner's Wyatt Earp and Bruce Willis at Tom Mix teamed up to solve a sordid Hollwood mystry in Blake Edwars' Sunset.

Bruce Willis played Mix teaming up with James Garner’s Wyatt Earp to solve a Hollywood mystery in the 1988 Blake Edwards film Sunset. 

In the ultimate pop culture tribute, Mix is one of the faces on the cover of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Pulp Master Max Brand’s Tough Life and Death

Frederick Schiller Faust a/k/a  Max Brand among a plethora of pen names.

Regular readers of this electronic rag know that I frequently profile writers.  In addition to dedicating a whole month to poets, I regularly feature almost exhaustive bios of novelists, mostly American.  Playwrights, screenwriters, journalists, historians, and biographers get their share of attention.  All natural for a guy with a crush on the written word.  What might be less apparent is the soft spot in my heart for those literary outcasts, the pulp writers who decade after decade ground out popular fiction for pennies a word as they struggled to make a living. 

A handful did damned well and became famous and rich, if not respected—think Ned Buntline, Horatio Alger, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Gray, Dashiell Hammett, and a slew of science fiction scribes.  Some like Hammett and Isaak Asimov sometimes even finally win the attention of academicians and critics who proclaim them not as pulp writers, but genre fiction masters—so much more impressive sounding.  And of, course, they have to acknowledge writers who did both literary work and popular schlock—Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott (who preferred her feminine hero potboilers to her beloved children’s classics), O. Henry, Jack London, and several 20th Century scribes.

Writers who spent their entire careers in the realm of lurid magazine covers and cheap paperbacks are generally ignored, dismissed, or reviled by the literati.   Take the fellow best known by the nom de plume Max Brand who also used a dozen or more monikers to cover his astonishingly profuse output.  He wrote more than 500 novels—for the pulps and almost as many shorter stories.  That represented a literary output between 25 and 30 million words.  New books based on magazine serials or previously unpublished work continues to appear.  That would average to average a new book every four months for seventy-five years.  And he continues to be reprinted almost every week each year, somewhere in the world.

Most of his works were westerns, a genre once phenomenally popular with the public but which has largely fallen out of fashion.  But he also churned out romances, fairy tales, legends, allegories, fantasies, dreams, animal stories, and psycho-dramas.  His hospital stories about the idealistic young Dr. Kildare and his crusty mentor Dr. Gillespie spawned a lucrative movie franchise, radio series, and two TV series.  More over the quality of all of this vast output was astonishingly good, not only readable in that page-turning-entertainment sort of way, but also notable for a fluid style and an untypical tendency for not-so-sympathetic lead characters—today we would call them anti-heroes—facing the dark nights of their own souls.

Frederick Schiller Faust was born in Seattle, Washington on May 29, 1892 to Gilbert Leander Faust and his third wife, Elizabeth Uriel.  His German father was a lawyer, land speculator, bank president, and lumber-mill owner, and his mother was of Irish stock.  When he was young, Gilbert fell on hard times and moved the family to the San Joaquin Valley of California where he hoped to rebuild his fortunes. 

Young Frederick’s beloved mother died when he was eight.   The boy consoled himself by retreating into books adventure books about knights in shining armor and other swashbuckling heroes.  He ate up The Idles of the King and other Round Table yarns, Robin Hood stories, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Lewis Stevenson.  He even tried writing his own stories in his school essay books.

Then at age 11 his father died leaving him an orphan and penniless at age 11.  Forced to shift for himself, he went to work as a farm worker, harvest stiff, casual laborer, and even sometimes as a ranch hand.  It was a life of punishingly hard labor which took a physical toll on his small frame.  In fact he may have injured the heart which gave him life-long problems.

He hated every minute of this drudgery.  But it was more than just resentment over having to work so hard, he felt alienated by those he worked with and for who, he said, “wouldn’t or couldn’t speak English,” by which he meant the elevated English of the “life of the mind” for which he yearned.

He tried to keep up with some schooling but sporadically attended 11 different schools before a distant relative, Thomas Downey, the principal of Modesto High School, took him in and introduced him to the classics of Greek and Latin.  The boy was adept and absorbed these classics and mythologies, all of which he mined for his later work.

With Downey’s help Faust gained admission to the University of California at Berkeley where the young man thrived as the as the editor of the Pelican, a campus humor magazine, served on the staff of the Occident student newspaper, and the yearbook in his senior year.  Despite completing four years work and all of his requirements, Faust, always resistant to authority, so offended the University President with something he wrote and was denied graduation with his class.

With no diploma to show for his work, Faust worked briefly for a Honolulu newspaper.  World War I was already raging in Europe, and young Faust, steeped in the romantic stories that he loved, yearned to prove himself.  He went to Canada where he enlisted in the Army.  But before he could be shipped to France, some other row with authority erupted and he deserted returning to the United States.

When the U.S. entered the war in 1917 Faust, then in New York City, rushed to enlist.  His medical examination turned up his damaged heart and he was rejected.  He was rejected again when he tried to get into that destination of many young writers, the American Field Service Ambulance Corp.  

Fredrich Faust as a young pulp writer.

Disappointed that he was missing the experience of his generation, Faust returned to California where he married an old sweetheart, Dorothy Shillig with whom he would have a happy marriage despite his sometimes dark moods and heavy drinking.  Together they had three children, Jane, John Frederick, and Judith Anne. 

In 1919 Faust contracted the deadly Spanish Influenza which further weakened his heart.

One of Faust's early successes was the publication of this novela in a 1918 edition of The Argosy.  A swashbuckler like the tales he loved as a boy, he used two of his regular nom de plumes.

By that year Faust was already supporting his family as a hard working writer.  He published his first short stories in 1917 in All-Story Weekly, and Argosy.  In his third story he first used his most well-known pen name, Max Brand.  He adopted the name because his very German sounding name was an anathema during the hyper-nationalism sweeping the nation during the war.  It was no great loss to him.

He never intended to use his real name for the pulp work he did just to support his real ambition—to become a world class poet.  In fact the only work he published under the name Fredrick Faust during his lifetime was poetry which, alas for him, was never well received.  He was perhaps too steeped in the romantic stuff of his youth and where his fiction often seemed fresh and modern, his verse was out of step with modernism, old fashioned, and somewhat too fussily wrought.

An early Max Brand pulp magazine western.

Publisher Frank Munsey’s two magazines, especially All-Story Weekly, quickly became Brand’s  first major home, although he peddled stories to other rags under a variety of names.  His earliest stories were not westerns, but covered a number of adventure genres.  One, a mining yarn, was set in the contemporary west.  When Munsey’s biggest star, Zane Gray, jumped to better paying slick magazines, the publisher encouraged Brand to try his hand at westerns.  Initially unenthusiastic, even resentful, he tried his hand at it.  His earliest stories even caged some of Gray’s plots and situations.

But Brand quickly realized the western was the perfect update for the swordplay epics he had loved as a child and was also a place where mythic archetypes could work out their implacable destinies.  Where Gray had specialized in florid descriptions of the Western landscape and detailed descriptions of ranch life, Brand specialized in psychological reflection.  His heroes at their best tried to contain a basic rage and brutality, often failing.  His women were strong, resourceful, and often startlingly independent yet they held out to the flawed men hope of redemption, sometimes allowing them to come to peace with civilization itself.  

In 1918 Putnam published Faust's first western novel, adaped from a pulp seial, under the name Max Brand.

After several successful stories and novellas, Brands first novel between the boards, The Untamed was expanded from a magazine serial in 1918 and published by Putnam in 1919.  It is still highly regarded by western buffs and set a standard for more work.  In it antagonist Dan Barry battles a bad man whose defeat in a brutal fist fight gives him. “a first taste of blood.” Brand followed up with three more Barry books in which he battles bad guys, his own rages, and is finally somewhat softened by the love a woman.  But in the final book, the woman shoots and kills Barry to prevent his brutality from ruining the life of their daughter.  Not the usual western fantasy found in the pulps.  In another book Brand would tell the story of the daughter coming of age in the shadow of her father’s past.  The books were all enormously successful and the greatest movie cowboy of the day, Tom Mix, made a film of The Untamed.

In the early 1920’s Brand shifted his primary allegiance to a new, better paying, publisher—Street & Smith and their Western Story Magazine edited by Frank Blackwell.  Blackwell was so enamored of Brand’s work that he often turned out whole issues—two novellas, a serial, and a short story entirely comprised of his work under a myriad of pen names including, in addition to Brand, including George Owen Baxter, Evan Evans, George Evans, David Manning, John Frederick, Peter Morland, George Challis, and Frederick Frost.

Brand was well on his way to financial success and security when he suffered a massive heart attack in 1921 at the age only 29 which severely weakened him and left him semi-invalid for a while.  Fearful for his life, he only redoubled his work output to provide for his family in case of his early death.  He was known to dash off 12,000 words over a weekend and kept up a merciless publication schedule.

By the mid-20’s he was hailed as the King of the Pulps.  Both the magazine pieces and the regular appearances of novels based on them by Putman, sold quickly and Brand’s price per word soared above the pittance offered by the pulps to most writers.

By 1926 Brand was able to take his wife and family to Florence, Italy where they resided comfortably at his home, Villa Negli Ulivi.  The pleasant weather and surroundings were good for his health, which improved, and he was able to do all of his work via the mails.

It was there that in 1930 Brand created one of his most popular characters, Destry, who first appeared in the serial Twelve Peers and adapted for book publication as Destry Rides Again.  It was a typical Brand story of a reckless cowboy and gunslinger framed for murder and out for revenge against the jury which had been stacked with his many enemies and sentenced him to a long stretch in prison.  As Destry gets his revenge on his release one by one, he is saved by the love of the girl who never believed he was guilty and stayed with him.  The book is widely regarded as a western classic.

Destry Rides Again was Tom Mix's first talking picture and one of his last films for a major studio.  The story was completley different than Brand's succesful novel and was the model for subsequent versions with James Stewart and Audi Murphy.

Naturally, it was quickly optioned to the movies.  Tom Mix made the first version.  But it and subsequent versions had little to do with the book.  In fact it had a totally different plot and Destry’s first name was changed to Tom, probably for Mix.  The most famous version, staring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich followed a similar plot to the Mix film, about the innocent and idealistic young lawman who after killing one man swears never to use his guns to kill again, despite his legendary skill with them.  Of course he is eventually forced to take them up again after the saloon singer who took a fancy to him despite being allied with the villain takes a bullet trying to save him.  A third version starring Audie Murphy followed the earlier movie plots.

Despite the changes, Brand was glad to take the money—and to see that his original story remained perpetually in print, as it does to this day.

By 1936 the political situation in Italy made Brand’s continued residency in Florence untenable.  He and his family returned to the U.S.  By this time he had left the pulps mostly behind.  New stories and serials were snapped up by the better paying popular slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.  

Frederich Faust and his family in the late 1930's.

The family settled in Los Angeles and Brand got work as an in-demand screen writer doing adaptations of his own stories as well as other work.  He could command as much as $3,000 a week as a movie writer, making him one of the best paid writers

In 1937 Brand created his most enduring character, not a cowboy or gunslinger at all.  Dr. James Kildare first made his appearance in magazine stories but was quickly snapped up by Paramount Pictures as the lead character for the film Internes Can’t Take Money starring Joel McCray as Kildare and Barbara Stanwyck as the widow of a gangster and ex-con herself.  It was originally more of a gangster movie into which the young doctor stumbled, as one might expect of Brand.  

Brand wrote the screen plays for the first six Dr. Kildare films, a phenominally popular MGM series that boosted the studio A picures  when they appeared on double bills.

MGM snapped up the rights to Kildare out from under Paramount’s nose, which hadn’t given a thought to his potential for a movie series.  Brand was enlisted as a script writer.  In the new incarnation started with Young Doctor Kildare with Lew Ayers as he intern and Lionel Barrymore as a new character, Dr. Gillespie, the wise but crusty hospital chief of staff who takes the young man under his wing.  That film and seven sequels largely revolved around that relationship as Ayers acts as a medical sleuth, diagnosing and treating mystery cases with Gillespie’s guidance.  The series was so successful that after Ayers was dropped during World War II for his pacifism, Van Johnson continued on with Barrymore as a new intern, Dr. Randall “Red” Adams.  Brand was not involved with these final films, but continued to receive screen credit—and, of course, royalties.

The character would be revived in the hit NBC 1961-’66 television series Dr. Kildare starring Richard Chamberlin as the protégé and Raymond Massey as Dr. Gillespie.  The show, along with Ben Casey which premiered the same year on ABC, established the hospital/doctor TV genre that remains a mainstay of the medium.  A 1972 syndicated program Young Dr. Kildare lasted only 24 episodes.

America’s entry into World War II revived Brand’s determination to get into the war despite his age and ill health.   He tried several times to offer his services in some way, but was turned down.  Finally, in 1944 he became a war correspondent for Harper’s magazine by hiding his heart ailments from him.  He first covered the 212th Marine Fighter Squadron's operations at Guadalcanal.  His book length non-fiction account was found in manuscript 40 years later and finally published as Fighter Squadron at Guadalcanal in 1996 by the US Naval Institute Press.  It received high praise from military and aviation historians.

Brand's manuscript based on his reporting for Harper's Magazine was rediscovered and published 22 years after his death to high praise from military and aviation historians

Latter in 1944 Brand was with the infantry in the front lines of the notoriously hard and brutal Italian campaign.  He earned the admiration of the young troops more than a generation his junior sharing their hardships amid the mud and mire and was often exposed to fire.  On May 12, 1944, days short of his 52nd birthday, Brand was mortally wounded along with several young soldiers in an artillery attack.  Bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds, Brand refused treatment from medics until all of his young companions were tended to.  By that time it was too late.

The death of such a famous writer at the front attracted a lot of attention.  President Franklin Roosevelt, after reviewing the official Army account of the incident, publicly praised Brand for his final sacrifice.