The Eric Metaxas Show - Charles Leerhsen

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

Charles Leerhsen talks about his new book, "Butch Cassidy," as well as a previous one, "Ty Cobb," and sheds light on both the good and the bad of both controversial figures in American culture.

You know, they say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least make it a double, even triple line. Now here's your line-jumping host, Eric Mataxis. Hey there, folks, welcome to the Eric Mutaxis show. As you know, this is the show about everything. And by everything, that means pretty much everything. Usually I interview authors on one subject or another. We talk politics, we talk faith, we talk history, we talk sports. We like to talk about everything because I think to do anything else would be parochial and boring. So today I have a great joy of speaking to an accomplished, celebrated author and editor. I'm holding his book in my hands here.

His name is Charles Larson. He lives in Brooklyn. So, you know, we could have done this over coffee someplace in southern Manhattan. But we chose to do it via Zoom. the new book, which is just out today as we record this, it's a biography of someone you may think you know, Butch Cassidy. It's the true story of an American outlaw, Charles Larson.

Welcome to this program, and congratulations on this book. Thanks so much, Eric. It's fun to be here with you. Well, look, I love talking to fellow authors because I have some sense of what goes into writing a book. I came to know you because I happened to get in the mail, as I think millions of people do, the publication of Hillsdale College. They gave me an honorary degree some years ago, and I love their president. And they're just good folks.

And I read this thing about Ty Cobb, and I said, what is this? This is an absolutely different take, a positive take on Todd Cobb. who's been vilified for a hundred years. And so I began to look you off and I realized I want to talk to you about Taikob, but then I realized you've got a brand new book coming out on Butch Cassidy. So before we talk about the Georgia Peach, let's talk about Butch Cassidy. I really know very little about him. So tell my audience who may also know very little about him. Who was Butch Cassidy? Well, Butch Cassidy was a Western outlaw. And of course, he's known. primarily through the movie Witch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is 51 years old now,

that came out 51 years ago in 1969. And it's funny how things go. Like before that movie came out, Hollywood kind of rescued him from obscurity. He'd kind of fallen into obscurity. He wasn't like Billy the Kid or Jesse James. Their name was still out there. But Rich Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were kind of forgotten, except for a small part of it called the Inner Mountain West.

and but William Goldman wrote this great screenplay George Roy Hill directed a great movie and it was a big hit movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman

and we know Butch through that movie as a charming, witty guy who and kind of a deep thinker at the same time too and the funny thing was

and to my great relief when I set out to do the research for this book I found that the real Butch Cassidy was a charming, witty, funny guy and a real

deep thinker too. I was grateful to find that, but sometimes when you research Western outlaws who've been made famous by Hollywood, you're sorely disappointed in the real version of the guy. You find out that they're the 19th century version of Charles Manson, which is not

so much fun. Or even worse, some kind of drunken pimp or something, you know, who didn't really... Drunken pimp. Those two words have not been spoken on this show in the five years we've been doing it. So thank you. I think you get a $20 check for that. Drunken pimp.

No. Okay, now let me ask you because I don't remember the movie. I don't know that I ever watched it all the way through. It's one of those films with which everyone's somewhat familiar. But, you know, you get the idea that in the 60s and onward, we began to glorify what we would call anti-heroes, you know, people, you know, killers and and things like that. And you never really know the real story because it's kind of fun and glamorous to be on the lamb and to be, you know, working against the law, which is portrayed as corrupt.

What is Butch Cassidy's story? Where was he born? And how did he find himself becoming the man that you're writing about? Well, it's a real American story in the sense that he was this child of immigrants. His mother and father came here from England, and they were brought here on a mission by the Mormons who went to England to convert a lot of people. The Mormons were setting up this colony in Utah, and they needed people to come there and do the work and populate it, and they went to England to get them. So his parents came here from England. He was born here in 1866. His real name is Robert Leroy Parker, and he was born in a little town called Beaver, Utah.

and the family soon moved to Centerville, Utah, where there's a cabin today. You can go visit the cabin where he grew up in. And he grew up from there, and he was a reader from early on, a reader of books. And I think that opened up the world to him. Like a lot of children of immigrants, he looked at the hard-scrabble life of his parents,

and he said, I want something better. You know, I kind of want to, I don't want to just be like, them and you know and die here in southern Utah in the same bed that was born in and I want to go out in the world so he had this romantic notion of the world and partly for his own entertainment and partly and partly as a way of striking back against the big corporations that were coming out west and and he thought oppressing the regular working man he he took to this life of crime and he wasn't consistent in it. The nice part about it from me, as someone who was going to spend

now a couple of years researching it, was that he had a kind of a strict moral code, unwritten but strict. He didn't hurt anyone physically or even financially, except the corporations that he was develing. So he was, I guess you could say he was a kind of a Robin Hood figure in the sense that he did actually have a code. Because a lot of times, you know, you find out that people were just bloodthirsty, sought off maniac killers, and then we kind of celebrate them. But you're saying this is a man who, despite his career in crime, had some kind of a heart. Yeah, he, his big problem was with the big time, big cattle ranchers,

the railroads and the banks that were coming out west. And, you know, the story of the West is different than what we learned in the movies. You know, a lot of people were sold a bill of goods, tempted to move out there and told they could make a great living out there and told that the land would be fertile and that they would prosper almost automatically. There was a saying that when people objected and said, well, but it only gets, it's only a half inch of rain a year in this part of Wyoming, you're telling me to move to. and one of the promoters is a great line. He said, the rain will follow the plow. In other words, if you start farming, it'll start raining. And, you know, that didn't happen.

And so people were struggling and having a very hard time of it out there, even before the railroads and the banks and the big cattle moved out and made life even more difficult for them. Well, the book is brand new today is the launch of the book. Again, it's titled Butch Cassidy by Charles Larson, the true story of an American Outlaw. How did you, Charles, find your way to this subject? What led you to want to write about of all people, Butch Cassidy?

Well, I just finished a book on Ty Cobb that you mentioned, and I was casting about for a subject. And this is one of those cases where the editor suggested it, and I said, you know, I don't really know too much about Western history of Butch Cassidy. But as a journalist, that's one of the joys of being a journalist that you start out totally ignorant on something and you wind up sort of lecturing the rest of the world on it because you spend, in my case, four years doing the research and trying to track down Butch's steps. And even going, I went to Argentina and I went to Bolivia to follow the trail of Butch

Cassidy. So it was this great adventure for me. And as I say, it was sort of inspiring to do because the guy I was following was a guy with an idea other than just grabbing money and killing people. He wasn't exactly a Robin Hood. He didn't take from the rich and get to the poor, but part of the outlaw machismo ritual thing was to spend so much money after you'd rob a bank or a railroad. You blew it all in town. So the money found its way back into the local economy. trickled down economics. We'll be right back, folks. It's the Eric Mattaxia show. Don't go away. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to the author Charles Blareson, who has a new book out on Butch Cassidy, the true story of an American Outlaw. We're also going to be talking about his previous book on Ty Cobb. And I have to say, Charles, I didn't introduce you at all properly. I mean, you were the editor of Sports Illustrated. You were the editor of People magazine, of Us Weekly. You've written. many books. You've co-written books with Chuck Yeager. Not many of us can make that claim. You've co-written books with Brandon Tartikoff and Son of a Gun with Donald Trump, whatever became of him.

You don't hear about him so much anymore. I don't know. I'll have to Google it when I get off the interview. Yeah, he's probably just, you know, having a quiet retirement with the grandkids. Well, let me just say that I'm fascinated with biography, not least, because I have written three biographies myself. But when you're writing about somebody like a Butch Cassidy, how did you go about it? In other words, was there a lot of original research? I don't seem to have the timer or inclination to do that kind of research because it seems so difficult.

But with a figure like Butch Cassidy, I'm imagining that there may have been some of that. Yeah, there were obstacles. There were real challenges. You expect them in every book. I mean, as I say, the difference between writing a book about a baseball player and Western Outlaw is dramatic because of baseball players, the teams have rosters, they have schedules, and they go to big cities. And like in those back in the Thai cops, they were seven newspapers in every town that wrote a story about the game or what was going on with the team.

So there's a lot of documentation. With Western Outlaws, these are guys that are trying to be elusive and evasive. And they did a pretty good job of it. And so they're very hard to get a solid. grip on and the and the western newspapers of the time weren't all that much of a help because they were very sensationalist and uh you know eager to you know that they had which cassidy's wild bunch with the gang that he traveled with i don't think there were ever more than six or eight of them on any one job that they committed but the newspapers would have you believe there were

100 or 200 of them sweeping out of the hills and uh you know knocking off banks and and and and The journalistic standards were not what they could have been. Right, right. It said kind of like what happened with the New York Times in the last four years. Well, listen, no joking. We have to talk about the experience of writing a book like this, because I know that when you're dealing with somebody as complex as Bush Cassidy, you know, how do you not portray him as a hero?

I mean, he was a professional criminal. It's an extraordinary thing. let's start at the end. How did he end his life? When and how did he end his life? Well, those who've seen the movie know that the movie kind of chickened out on this very important part of the story. The Hollywood was afraid to let you spend two hours

with two lovable, charming guys and have them die right in front of you in the end. But they did, in fact, despite what a lot of people say, and a lot of people will tell you they lived, which anyway, lived until the 1930s and the 1940s came back to America. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that they died in Bolivia in 1908. And I won't give away too much for people who want to read it because there's some interesting twists and turns in the very last days of their life.

But it's all but certain. we don't have hard physical evidence, but we have, like I say, overwhelming circumstantial evidence. And I tracked them down to this obscure town in Bolivia, this mining town called San Vincente, where they had a shootout with the local militia. And they got trapped a few days after pulling off their last job and getting in the mountains of Bolivia and getting to their surprise, the equivalent of $200,000 in American money. which by far the most, the biggest haul they ever made in their lives. And as someone said, you can't take it with you. So that's an extraordinary amount of money in those days.

Absolutely unbelievable. And, you know, Eric, in those days, it was physical money. You had toad it around and carry it around. And these guys sometimes got money belt soars from carrying around so much money on there. So, you know, the more you stole, the slower you went afterwards. Charles, that is a good problem. I look forward to getting money belt soars at some point. Seriously, that's why did they have to go? Now we say they, we're talking about Butch and Sundance, who found their way to South America. At what point did they do that and why?

Well, it was just getting too hot for them in the states. They committed in 1899, in 1900, in those two years, they committed. three robberies, which for them was three major robberies, which for them was quite a lot. And the Pinkertons, who were a private security force that existed in the days before America had a national police force before there was an FBI, and the Pinkertons would be hired by corporations to track down the robbers who would be deviling their businesses. The Pinkertons were closing in on them. And they realized they had to make a run for it. Now, Bush Cassidy's whole life was a series of swings between criminal life, and then he'd get tired of being pursued, and he'd say, wouldn't it be great if I could just be a rancher? And then he'd go into ranching

for a while. Then he'd get bored with that, and the pendulum would swing the other way. So this was a big swing in their life. They said, let's go to Argentina, and let's try to be legitimate ranchers. And so they did that. In 1901, they came to New York City, spent a while a year because this is the way to get to Argentina from the boatyards here, the shipping shipyards. And so they got on a steamer in 1901 in February, and they went from Brooklyn, not far from where I'm talking to you from. It was a 33-day trip to Argentina on the steamer in those days, to Buenos Aires, I should say, on steamer and then horseback and maybe a little train, too. And so they made that trip down there. And for five years, they were legitimate ranchers.

There's a lot of documentation, them filling out forms about homesteading and getting their official brand for the cattle and all that kind of stuff. They were very meticulous and very good boys about doing everything. So it was Butch Sundance and the beautiful Ethel Place, who in the movie is called Edda Place, but whose real name was Ethel. And the three of them, kind of an odd group, were down there in a, in a, a part of Argentinean Patagonia called Cholila. Way down, days ride from the nearest train station,

and they lived their life down there quietly and pretty successfully for about five years. And then the Pinkerton started to close in on them there. They found out where they were. And one day, Butch and Sundance took off from the ranch and Ethel and they left it all behind, got back into the criminal life and wound up in Bolivia in 1908

and met their end there. Amazing. Yeah, they didn't portray that in the film. If it had been directed by Sam Peckinpaw, I'm thinking they would have portrayed it in the film. That's so interesting. Well, it's an exciting part of American history, understanding these outlaws and why we celebrate them in a way. And I think some of them are worth celebrating.

And others, I don't know. I mean, when you think of Jesse James or Billy the kids, some of them were just killers. And it's an odd thing that celebrate killers. I mean, if there were one in your neighborhood, you wouldn't celebrate him. That's what made it impossible for me to devote so much time and energy to this book, I think, was which wasn't a killer. and any and if you rode with him he rode with killers and the guys in the gang were sometimes

with killers but you couldn't hurt anyone and you certainly couldn't kill them if you were riding with butch so and where do you think he got that you know that that moral idea from because that is really interesting let's see he grew up in a very strong Mormon community but his family was not very strictly Mormon at all I think it was just something he didn't want to want to be, you know, part of it, he was a very charismatic guy, and part of his, he wanted to have fun and he kind of wanted to bring a lighthearted spirit wherever he went throughout the West, which was, you know, a hard, a hard mission to accomplish. But I think that was part of it. He didn't, he just didn't want to be that. He wanted to be entertaining. He wanted life to be

more fun than it was. And he applied interesting kind of intellectual gimmicks and tricks to robbery. He's the guy that brought about the idea of a relay team of horses, and this took a lot of preparation, you know, weeks of preparation sometimes before. He'd have horses staked out every few miles.

Because being an outlaw on those days was just a matter of outrunning the posse once you committed your crime. He'd form a posse and chase you. So this was a way to get way ahead of the posse, you know, by changing horses every few miles. So there was that. It was also the

way he and the gang dressed very well. And they showed up bathed always, you know, clean and shaven and well-dressed because they wanted to be professionals. And they thought they could impress the people that were robbing just to turn over the money, turn over the bank's money without any kind of resistance. We're going to go to another break. When we come back, folks, I'm talking to Charles Larson, the author of Butch Capacity, the true story of an American Outlaw.

Don't go away. President Trump has a huge announcement for his. top supporters will be celebrating the 2020 Republican National Convention this summer and he wants you to enter for your chance to join him at the convention. If you win, the team will cover the flight, hotel and give you VIP passes for yourself and a guest. All you have to do is text Metaxus to 88022 today for your chance to meet President Trump at the convention. Again, that's METAXAS to 88022 to enter to win this once in a lifetime opportunity via special guest paid for by Donald J. Trump for president. Welcome back. I'm talking to a fellow author,

Lars Larson, he's written a biography of Butch Cassidy, the true story of an American outlaw. But, you know, I mentioned, Charles, that it was because of your book on Ty Cobb that I came to know of you. And I was fascinated because my whole life I've heard what a monster Ty Cobb was. And when I read the speech you gave at Hillsdale College, how did you come to give a speech at Hillsdale College on your book on Ty Cobb? They invited me. And, And, you know, they heard about the book and asked me to come out. It's kind of a message that people on both sides of the political aisle like to hear. I'd say people on the right side of the political aisle, maybe like to hear it more than people on the left side. But I can't help, you know, what I found, the facts that I found that sort of make Ty Cobb not the racist monster that a lot of people think he was. Well, I mean, I think it's always important that we face the facts, whatever they are. But I was stunned when I read your speech. I mean, I know Larry Oren, the president of the college, and I've been there.

And I thought, this is just fascinating because I remember when I first went to college, you know, in the 80s, one of the first things I heard out of the mouth of my first black friend, my roommate, was Ty Cobb, was a racist monster. And like, that did it for me. And for all these decades, I've thought, yeah, he was a racist monster. So when I read your story, I thought, wow, this is, you know, there are many cases of this, but this is a really grave injustice that somebody has portrayed a certain way. And then you find out that it's at least, it's at least flawed. And then you find out that, no, it's, in fact, more than flawed.

It's really a misrepresentation. And how did you come to the story of Taekov? Well, I thought Taikov hadn't had a major biography done. on him in a long time. And that was also just a fact that he'd been at least 20 years since anyone written a book. And he's an important baseball player. He still has today the highest batting average of all time. And he always will at this point. Let's face it. Or 367 people still argue about, which is an official one. And I came to it with the traditional idea that he was a monster and a terrible guy. And I thought, well, that's making the little easier to write about in a way

because he's like colorful. Right. In that sense. But as soon as I started doing the research, I found some very inconvenient, you know, facts that didn't jive with that, with that preconceived notion of him. And I got into it several years of research, which showed me how this myth over the years had built up.

It was partly based on lies told by one sports writer who created, I like to say, like the spark that eventually so it turned into a raging forest fire and partly by people by the people wanting to believe a certain thing partly by prejudice against people from the south people assuming certain things just because Ty Cobb was born in Georgia

and not knowing until I came up with it I didn't know this at the start either that he actually descends from a family of abolitionists So we had to. You got to stop right there because when I read that, I said to myself, Are you kidding? I mean, it's one thing to find out that history has been unkind to someone. It's another thing to find out that the narrative is precisely the opposite of what you would have guessed.

I mean, to descend from a family of abolitionists, those are some pretty solid bona fides, if you're going to talk about race in America. That is absolutely amazing. And where were they located in the United States? In Georgia, South Carolina and Georgia, the Cobbs, Ancestually Cobb was from Georgia, as known as the Georgia Peach was born in Georgia in 1886. So people say, born in Georgia, 1886, how can the guy not be racist? Yeah.

And so it goes from there, and they spin out from there. But as a matter of fact, throughout his playing career, which started in 1905 and lasted until 1928, there's no examples, there's no instances. He gets in a fight with a black street worker at one point, but he got in fights with a lot of different people. Most of them were white, and there's not a pattern of him saying anti-black things or particularly fighting with black people.

And then at the end of his career, I mean, after his career in 1951, when he was asked, after the Jackie Robinson era had started, you know, what he thought about, it was then the Texas League, the minor league being integrated. He said, in this quarter to the story news, he said, the Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly

and not grudgingly into baseball. So the Negro has the right to play professional sports and who's to say he has not. That's Ty Cobb's only statement on the record about race and baseball and look at the reputation he has in contrast to that. Well, what's astounding to me, is that that goes so far beyond not being a racist.

I mean, racism was endemic, and you have all kinds of people in the sports establishment of the time that just assumed a racial perspective on things. And you're telling me that the one guy that has been vilified as a racist comes out with a statement that, you know, you'd think Branch Ricky would have said that. I mean, that is truly astounding. I'm amazed that I've never heard a hint of any of this before.

How old was he when he died or what year did he die? He died in 1961 and he was 74 years old, I believe. And so he died a long time ago. His playing career ended a long time ago. And because there was no film of him and he was just sort of an abstract idea, I think that allowed people to think they could. Right. The old war should.

Any way they wanted. Forgive me. We're going to go to a break. We'll be right back, folks, talking about Ty Cobb with the author of a new book on Butch Cassidy, Charles Larson. Welcome back. I'm talking to Charles Larson, who's written a new book on Butch Cassidy, The Truth Story of an American Outlaw.

And we're talking about his previous book about Ty Cobb. Charles has anyone besides you revealed the side of Ty Cobb? to which were, that we're discussing right now. The idea that he was not only not a racist, but he was really anti-racist, at least for his time, rather dramatically anti-racist. Yeah, he was.

As you started, as you said before, the, you know, he was when asked to comment on the Jackie Robinson era and what Jackie Robinson said, a lot of guys avoided comment or they said, you know, they said something like it's too soon or whatever. Cobb went out of his way to make positive statements. Other people, yes, since my book came out, there's been another book that's come out that has said more or less the same thing.

But, yeah, I mean, there's a Ken Burns, famous Ken Burns baseball documentary movie. I've seen it at least once, you bet. And Cobb has made to be sort of the villain of that, because Ken Burns didn't do any extra research. He just accepted the whole cloth, this myth that had been going around, and just propagated it further and amplified it. fight it further. Before we continue, what kind of a dog is that? Wheaton Terrier. Weet and Terrier. Weet and Terrier.

So, okay, we're talking about Ty Cobb. You mentioned Daniel Okrant, who was, I think he was the, I'm sorry, what do they call it, the public editor at the New York Times briefly. And I know John Thorne is in the, is in the PBS film that Ken Burns made. And it is interesting when someone has been vilified as a racist like this for literally many decades, when you find out that it's not only not true, but it's dramatically untrue. It does seem that they deserve, that deserves, that deserves to be dealt with. I mean, you do it in your book, obviously. But I guess I'm wondering if Ken Burns will want to correct that somehow, because it's such a wonderful.

series on baseball. I don't know if he'll have the opportunity. Yeah, I, you know, I don't, I don't see it. I don't, I don't see him admitting something or going back and, you know, redoing something. He's, he hasn't said, he's never said anything about it. And so, and I don't expect him to at this point. Well, and of course, it's, it's hard once you've committed yourself to some great work to go back and, and mess with it. As writers, you and I, know that, you know, if somebody points something out in your book, you do want to fix it, and you fix it in the second edition, much harder to do with a PBS documentary. Talk to us about just the racism aside, it was often said that he was nasty.

We're talking about Ty Cobb on the base paths and that he would spike everybody. He got the chance to spike. You talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that, this whole myth of Cobb, the monster, You know, if it has a germ of truth, it's that he was a very intense player. When he came up in 1905, baseball and baseball players, it was kind of, they were like carnies. They weren't like the professional, you know, multimillionaires we have today. In fact, they were making less than the people who were sitting in the stands watching them.

And they were young men who drifted in and out of this new thing, professional sports, and drank a lot and didn't take care of themselves. And the whole idea of baseball had been, they weren't take me seriously. Cobb was one of the first to say, look, this could be a profession. This could be, this is a game with some integrity and depth. And if we address it a certain way,

we can be professionals and we can earn enough money to have families. And so he took that approach. he also part and parcel of that approach was a kind of a more scientific approach to the game about how can I in each situation you know get how can I get to first base and then how can I get to second base and how can I get to third base? And it was a runner's game. There were no runs, you know, obviously until Ruth comes on the scene, it was all about bunting and stealing and so on and so forth. And Cobb was the master at that.

Right, right. scratching and clawing your way around the base. Someone once said that he'd rather see someone, Ty Cobb getting a walk was more exciting than make Ruth hitting a home run. Because when Ruth hit a home run, yeah, it was exciting, but it was all over in a flash. With Cobb, when he got to first base, the fun was just beginning because he would try to fake you out and try to intimidate you.

He liked this idea that people thought that he slid with his spikes up. In fact, there's a whole chapter in my book of guys' testimony. to that that he never did. And in fact, he was trying to slide away for the ball in most cases. Whoops. There's a dog again. There's the terrier. Right.

And, but, but, but he loved that idea of playing this mental game, which was, which is always fun. And of course, which in those days was entirely new. Like, no one approached a game like that. I mean, the same thing about Jackie Robinson. I mean, once that guy got on base, you didn't know what was going to happen. And he might. which we don't see anymore.

When we're talking about Mike Cobb, it's just fascinating to me to think what a different game was in those days. And you're probably familiar with the glory of their times, one of the greatest major books ever written. And I remember reading that book and thinking, what a world. It was just an entirely different universe.

Right. Yeah, it was a whole different game. It was a little bit like indoor, baseball might be, you know, you poke the ball to a spot in the field, you know, Willie, Willie Cuehers that hit it, hit him where they, hit them where they ain't. And that was the idea. And then you scratched and poured your way around. And it was in a way, a more interesting game. But people who say that the game of baseball never changed and has never changed, and, you know, that's, that's simply not true because it changed fundamentally between Cobb and Ruth.

That's the whole thing is that the game changed, the rules didn't change, and you can still have and so on and so forth, which is why it's fascinating. We're going to be right back. Final segment, folks. I'm talking to Charles Larson, who's all the way in Brooklyn, and I'm in Manhattan. We'll be right back. Folks, I'm talking to a biographer. As you know, I'm fond of the concept. His new book is Butch Cassidy, The Truth Story of an American Outlaw, Charles Larson. Let me ask you again, because I wasn't sure I was clear on how you found your way to the subject of Butch Cassidy, because when you write about somebody for a whole book, you know, that's a big

commitment. What was it that made you say, I want to write about him or that led you even in that direction? Well, I was casting about for a subject. And, you know, my editor said to me one day, what about Yogi Berra? That was the first suggestion because I had just come off this book about Ty Cobb. Right. And I actually messed around with that for a couple of months. And then I just, I don't know, a book came out about Yogi recently and, you know, I haven't read it so I can't say. But, you know, I watched Yogi play and all that, but I wasn't, I don't know, I just couldn't get into that. And then he said, well, he's a Western outlaw buff, my editor, and I'm not. So I told you were going to say Yogi Barrow was a Western Outlaw buff.

I think you're confusing. Okay, go ahead. Sorry. And, and so he said, what about Witch Cassidy? And so I said, well, let me look into it. you know, as I mentioned before, the thrill of journalism. I worked at Newsweek for many years, and that was my, it was a life-changing experience for me, but the great fun of Newsweek was that on Monday, an editor would come in and say,

hey, how about doing this story? And you knew nothing about it. And by Friday, you were telling the world, you know, what the deal was with that story. So I saw that, you know, stretched out over four years of Fridays as basically the challenge here. So I, you know, I enjoyed the challenge. And I enjoyed the challenge. And I enjoyed the challenge of learning about Western history and learning a little bit about Hollywood history. You know, one of which is best friends, a guy named L. Z. Lay, who was actually a better friend of his than the Sundance Kid, but But Witch Cassidy and L. Z. Lay doesn't sound as good or Lucas Bud,

Marquis. So they made it the Sundance Kid and they made it a composite character. But L. Z. Lay wound up, lasted so long that he wound up being a consultant in Hollywood to Western movies. and he's buried in forests on the cemetery out there in Hollywood. So the Butch area is not that far away. One of Butch's sisters was still alive when the movie came out in 1969 and hopping mad because she never got any money from Hollywood for her story. That's what's so strange is that we forget that, you know,

what to you and me seems like a moment ago is 50 years ago. And 50 years ago, there were people from that era who are, still alive. It's just hard for us today to believe, but it is amazing. I just want to congratulate you on all the work that goes in to writing these books about figures that are complex. And I'd love to get you back on the program just to keep talking about things like that or talk to some of your, talk about some of your other books, because as you can imagine, I'm really fascinated with history. So, of course, the basic question, what do you suppose? you'll be working on next or do you know?

I do know because I'm already doing it and I'm working on a biography of Anthony Bourdain which has been really fascinating and really challenging in a way because a lot of the people around him have circled the wagons

and they don't want to look about it which is ironic because Bordane was constantly I say tracking memoir wherever he went. He was always talking about himself and always scrupulously honest about himself. Although he didn't go certain places,

oddly enough to say about Anthony Bourdain, in his life, he didn't go in certain places, a certain direction, so there's lots of say. And, of course, there's this big riddle at the center of it about why the guy with the best job in the world took his own life. Yeah, and I thought the same thing, of course, of Kate Spade around that time.

Well, listen, good luck with that. I do look forward to talking to you again. congratulations on both books. I hope my audience will grab your book on Ty Cobb and your brand new book on Butch Cassidy, Charles Larson. Thanks again. Thanks so much, Art.