Will Rogers State Historic Park
Will made his home in Beverly Hills during the early twenties. In 1922 Will bought the property above Sunset Boulevard commanding a view of western Los Angeles, Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean, where he built a small weekend cottage. In 1926, he built a polo field on the land. In 1928 Will, his wife Betty, and their three children – Will Jr., Mary, and Jimmy – moved to the ranch, and the home was enlarged to it’s present size of thirty-one rooms.
Today, the grounds and the ranch buildings are maintained as they were when the family lived here. The living room – with it’s comfortable furniture, porch swing in the center room, and many Indian rugs and baskets – is most revealing of Will’s personality. The mounted calf was given to him to rope in place of roping his friends.
The attractive patio was often used for dining. The north wing of the house contains the family’s bedrooms. Will’s study, the library, and Betty’s favorite, the sunroom.
His ranch reflects his roots in horsemanship, starting with the polo field, which is the first thing you see when you look south from the parking area. The field is the only outdoor polo field in Los Angeles county. Featured in many movies and TV shows, the polo field features a gentle slope that forms an area for viewing the polo action.
Up from the parking area are the ranch buildings, including the visitor center, which once the ranch guest house. The visitor center features a film on the life of Will Rogers, literature and an audio tour of the grounds. The ranch buildings and grounds are maintained as they were when the Rogers family lived there in the late 1920s and 1930s. But the park is more than just an historic site, it’s also a working ranch. The park still retains many of the western equestrian activities that were a part of Will Rogers’ life. Up the hill from the main guest ranch, above the green expanse of lawn, are the stables, which have recently been renovated.
When You Visit...
The ranch became a state park in 1944 after the death of Mrs. Rogers. The admission charge includes access to the trails on it’s 186 acres as well as admission to the ranch house, a film on Will Roger’s life, and an audio tour of the grounds: the two-mile (three kilometer) loop trail to Inspiration Point is particularly popular, and a nature trail and longer hikes are available – check with the ranger. There is also a small picnic area and nature center.
The park is open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m; the house opens at 10 a.m. Sat-Sun and 11 a.m. Thurs-Fri. Call the park headquarters to arrange tours for groups of ten or more. Dogs must be on a leash. Dogs are not allowed on the Backbone trail or in the adjoining Topanga State Park, but are allowed on the Rivas Canyon Trail leading to and from Temescal Gateway Park.
Visitors are advised to call the park for details. The park also features a roping and training area for horses where visitors can watch the horses being put through their paces. Beyond the ranch and the stables are the trails that lead to spectacular views of the countryside around the park. Since Will Rogers State Historic Park is on the tip of the Santa Monica Mountains, the trails offer vistas of both the sea and the mountains. Visitors can hike to Inspiration Point or take the Rogers trail around the perimeter of the park. Whether visitors spent a few hours – or all day, Will Rogers State Historic Park truly has something for everyone – with both historic and natural features.
Will Rogers State Historic Park
1501 Will Rogers State Historic Park Road
Pacific Palisades, CA 90272
(310) 454-8212
WILL ROGERS AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL:
Will Rogers, beloved humorist and accomplished poloist,
was happiest on horseback.
.
by Robert Bryce
Tommy Hitchcock, the great ten-goal player of the 1920s and ‘30s, had hit the ball to within 60 yards of the goal. Charging after the ball, Hitchcock was followed closely by a more famous teammate, a three-goal player better known for his horsemanship than his shot-making. As Hitchcock bore down on the ball, raising his mallet for an easy score, teammate Will Rogers, riding tight on Hitchcock’s tail, yelled, “Leave it.” Rogers raced to the ball with his mallet cocked for the uncontested goal. He whiffed. Later, Rogers, wearing a sheepish grin, told Hitchcock, “I just wanted to see what it felt like to have a ten-goal player leave a ball for a rube like me.”
Seven decades have passed since Rogers laid chase to Hitchcock on that field on Long Island, but the event, recalled by Rogers’s son Jim, illustrates the great humorist’s passion for polo. It also indicates how proficient—and confident—Rogers was while on horseback. A well-known movie star, radio personality, newspaper columnist, and expert roper, the joke-cracking Rogers also was an accomplished poloist whose ardor for the game was unequaled. Rogers worked to popularize and support polo programs throughout the 1920s and ‘30s while playing with and against some of the most famous people on the planet. Guests who mounted for practice games at Rogers’s Santa Monica ranch included Hollywood types such as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Darryl Zanuck, and Walt Disney. Rogers was introduced to the game about 1915 during a stint in New York with the Ziegfeld Follies, and over the next two decades, played polo every chance he got, in Mexico, the Philippines, England, Spain, even with the Maharaja of Jaipur in India.
Extraordinarily skilled in the saddle, Rogers had a natural talent for polo and seldom found time for other sports. He disdained golf. However, if visitors to his ranch wanted to practice their strokes, Rogers often would shag their golf balls on horseback, smashing them back with his polo mallet.
Rated as a three-goal player at his death, Rogers had played as high as five goals. In a 1929 match at the Uplifter’s Club, while playing with his longtime friend, movie producer Hal Roach (a three-goal player), Rogers scored eight of his team’s 14 goals, including four goals in a single chukker. His passion made him excel, says his son Jim. “He was terribly competitive,” recalls the younger Rogers. “You did things one way, and that was full out. What do they say about golfers? ‘He was a money player.’ Well, that was Dad when it came to polo.” But as soon as everyone dismounted, his father’s competitive edge immediately softened. “Dad never cared who had won the game,” recalls Jim. “What mattered was that you played hard.”
Rogers certainly did. He was known for playing a rough-and-tumble game and often was thrown from his mount. In one spill, he broke two ribs when his horse rolled over him. Jim recalls a 1934 match, held at the Santa Barbara Polo Club, in which he played on the same side as his father.
As his father raised his mallet for a near-side back shot, his mount suddenly turned its head and the Oklahoma cowboy broke two fingers when his mallet hand hit the horse’s skull. Later, commenting on the rough nature of the sport, he wrote, “They call it [polo] a gentleman’s game for the same reason they call a tall man ‘Shorty.'”
Although Rogers played on some of the most elegant polo fields on earth, he was not a typical poloist. One-quarter Cherokee, he was born in 1879 on his family’s ranch near Oolagah, a smudge of a town in what was then known as Indian Territory, and began riding soon after he could walk. His deft horsemanship and roping soon enabled him to leave Oolagah for Argentina, where he planned to strike it rich in the cattle business. Quickly impoverished by his venture, he ended up taking a slow boat across the South Atlantic as an animal tender aboard a livestock ship. Upon arrival in South Africa, he joined Texas Jack’s Wild West Circus, working as a bronc rider and trick roper. He then made his way to New Zealand, where a reviewer in the Auckland Herald deemed Rogers capable of lassoing anything from “a wildly galloping steed to the business end of a flash of lightning.”
Rated as a three-goal player at his death, Rogers had played as high as five goals. In a 1929 match at the Uplifter’s Club, while playing with his longtime friend, movie producer Hal Roach (a three-goal player), Rogers scored eight of his team’s 14 goals, including four goals in a single chukker. His passion made him excel, says his son Jim. “He was terribly competitive,” recalls the younger Rogers. “You did things one way, and that was full out. What do they say about golfers? ‘He was a money player.’ Well, that was Dad when it came to polo.” But as soon as everyone dismounted, his father’s competitive edge immediately softened. “Dad never cared who had won the game,” recalls Jim. “What mattered was that you played hard.”
Upon his return to America for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Rogers quickly found work in Wild West shows and vaudeville. In 1905, making $20 a week, he appeared in New York’s Madison Square Garden for the first time. His blend of shy humor, political commentary, and trick roping enchanted East Coast audiences. In one of his signature tricks, Rogers threw three lariats at one time: The first ensnared the horse’s head, the second the rider’s body, and the third, the horse’s legs. Ten years after his arrival in New York, he was making $750 a week with the Ziegfeld Follies. Hollywood beckoned. By 1930, Rogers was making $200,000 per film, appearing with stars like Myrna Loy and Mickey Rooney, usually portraying himself in parts for which he often wrote the scripts and ad-libbed the dialogue. He eventually made 50 silent films and 21 talkies.
Given his humble roots in Oklahoma, it’s not surprising that Rogers rebelled against some of polo’s formal conventions. He often wore chaps or dungarees during games instead of the traditional whites, a matter that was a source of continuing consternation for his wife, Betty. Shortly after Rogers was killed in a 1935 plane crash, Los Angeles Times reporter Frank Finch wrote, “He erased the tea-drinking and ‘high society’ ideas about the mallet sport by appearing at swank polo clubs donned in overalls, cowboy boots,hatless and coatless, his $1.98 shirt open at the throat.”
While working to popularize polo, Rogers also undertook philanthropic efforts, paying for polo teams from schools in New Mexico and Oklahoma to travel to California to play the Stanford University team and sponsoring tournaments in Santa Monica for prep school programs. In 1933, he helped finance and mount the West Team so that it could compete against the East in Chicago. Led by Eric Pedley and Cecil Smith, the West won the series 15-11, 8-12, 12-6.
An aviation enthusiast, Rogers once wrote he had “found a real, legitimate use for my polo field. We landed on it.” Rogers played polo for the last time in Seattle, just days before heading to Alaska aboard an experimental seaplane with famed aviator Wiley Post. At the time of his death on August 15, 1935, Rogers was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood and undoubtedly the most famous man in America. The New York Times devoted four pages to the story of the Rogers-Post crash.
Rogers’s legacy—both philanthropic and paternal—continues to advance the sport of polo. The field and stables he built at his ranch a few blocks off Sunset Boulevard are now the Will Rogers Polo Club. It is the only grass polo field in Los Angeles County. The polo fields at the Uplifter’s and Riviera clubs, where Rogers often played, have long since fallen to the bulldozer. The field Rogers built, located inside the Will Rogers State Historic Park, currently hosts regular tournaments and has become a regional center for polo.
Following in their father¹s footsteps, Rogers¹s sons learned to play polo. Jim became a three-goal player as did his brother Will Jr. Jims two sons both grew up playing polo as well. Chuck Rogers a two-goal player played professionally for 20 years and has recently retired from the sport, and resides on his ranch in New Mexico. Kem Rogers continues to play and is a certified United States Polo Assn. umpire. He works at the club level and has officiated at many intercollegiate and interscholastic games mostly in the central region. Kem resides in Tennessee.
While Will Rogers enjoyed the competition and camaraderie of polo, he truly loved horses and was at his happiest on horseback. Polo offered him the perfect opportunity to escape his admiring fans. It also allowed him to compete, exercise, and, most of all, ride his favorite horses. “Polo,” he wrote, is played “by us lazy ones, because the horse does all the work and we love to just go for the ride.”