Will Rogers: Stage, Screen and Public Life in Photographs

Will Rogers stands at the center of this publicity still from Laughing Bill Hyde, with Anna Lehr at left. Published in a film trade paper, the picture belongs to his first year in motion pictures. It is a staged film image, not a record of ranch life.

Rogers poses with Will Hays in a photograph dated November 4, 1921—his forty-second birthday. The original catalog title spells Hays’s surname “Hayes.” The encounter places the entertainer beside a national political figure at a time when Rogers’s public profile was extending beyond the theater.

Rogers smiles beside Evalyn Walsh McLean, identified in the original catalog as Mrs. Ed McLean. The setting and the surrounding spectators show a public appearance, not a studio portrait. Such photographs helped circulate the image of an entertainer equally comfortable in the company of prominent people and ordinary spectators.

Rogers and Billy Mitchell sit in an aircraft at Bolling Field. Rogers had taken his first flight a decade earlier, according to the Will Rogers Institute’s chronology. This photograph belongs to his long interest in aviation; it should not be confused with the aircraft or journey on which he died in 1935.

Seattle mayor Charles L. Smith stands beside Rogers. The archival dating has been corrected from an impossible 1936 attribution to approximately 1935. The surviving record does not establish that the photograph was taken immediately before Rogers left for Alaska, so that tempting identification remains unconfirmed.