What are we to say about the admiration arising from the rest of the world—that is, from the rest of the world that has not been raised in the tradition of the horseman? How has it come to recognize the cowboy as a gentleman of honor? One way has been through the cinematic arts and through the vision and industry of selfless gentlemen like Robert Shelton of Tucson, Ariz., who has spent his life helping to put the story of the cowboy on film for worldwide distribution. As president of the legendary moviemaking location known as Old Tucson, he facilitated this and more. For Old Tucson was more than a movie set; it also became a tourist attraction that for 25 years received millions of visitors who revere the classic Westerns made there.

Born in 1921, Robert Shelton was raised in Kansas City, Mo. He came by his horsemanship by the immersion technique. As a teenager he was put in charge of a string of horses, so he slept in the barn with them. By the time he was 38, he had served in the Army Air Force in World War II, built a fine reputation as an advertising executive, earned accolades as an accomplished polo player, and mastered the cattleman’s trade as owner of an eastern Kansas cattle ranch. He also raised and trained polo ponies.

It was in 1958 that Shelton traveled to Tucson on vacation to visit his friend Jack Goodman. He told Goodman about a project that had been his life’s ambition: to build a frontier town on each end of the Santa Fe Trail. He wanted to provide Western hospitality to anyone who sought it. Goodman introduced him to the chairman of the county’s parks and recreation board, who in turn took Shelton out to see Old Tucson. The town was falling down, its adobe buildings were eroded, and its visitors were exposed to the merciless summer sun. Built by Columbia Studios in 1939 for the making of the film Arizona, it had fallen into such disrepair that it would have passed for an authentic ghost town. The county asked Shelton to consider amending his vision to one of resurrecting the town.

He did. And it wasn’t easy. “When I took over, it looked like bombed-out Berlin,” Shelton said. “However, it was on an ideal 320-acre site that bordered on the 29,000-acre Tucson Mountain Park. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum that had grown in popularity with tourists was right next door.”

Shelton signed the lease for the site in July 1959, restored the town, and drew 60,000 people for its opening in January 1960. It opened in time to serve as location for the filming of Sam Peckinpah’s Deadly Companions, starring Maureen O’Hara, Steve Cochran, Brian Keith, and Chill Wills. In one year, Shelton and his partners had revitalized Old Tucson as a major film location.

“So many people thought I was nuts,” Shelton said. “My idea at first was only to provide a theme park in the West where people could ride a stagecoach, feel a horse, drink a frosted root beer. When the movie industry showed interest, it just took off. I was fortunate, because the community backed me completely.

“As advisors in the building of the town, I had cowboy Jim Kenyon as a general manager, along with six other good hands. In the beginning, I sat in my car to write out their paychecks. Cowboys like Spec Wilson and ranchers like Ralph Wingfield, who had ridden the country horseback, helped me find locations. Wingfield was a lifelong friend of John Wayne’s.”

Old Tucson soon became known as the “Hollywood of the Desert.” Only Hollywood and New York City enjoyed more film business.

With the help and advice of his early cowboy helpers, Shelton built a stout, functional barn that served for everything from a livery stable to a stage for a bareknuckle prizefight. Beside the barn he built shipping pens so cattle could be loaded on the town’s train. From MGM Studios he bought the Reno locomotive, an operational railroad steam engine built in 1872. From Paramount Studios he bought freight and passenger cars.

Soon after he arrived in Tucson, Shelton met and married Jane Loew. It had been Jane’s grandfather Marcus Loew who had founded the Loew’s chain of vaudeville theaters and converted them into movie theaters when talking pictures arrived. After that, he founded Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) in Hollywood. Her father, Arthur Loew, was president of MGM. If all of this didn’t make her well-connected enough, well, Jane’s maternal grandfather was Adolph Zukor, who founded Paramount Studios. She and entrepreneurs Jack Goodman and George Masek became Shelton’s investor-partners. Shelton made it his rule to spend a week of every month in Hollywood, where he called regularly on studio heads to gather business for Old Tucson.

Shelton, right, with Robert Mitchum
during the filming of El Dorado

One day soon after the opening, as Shelton crossed the Old Tucson plaza, a stranger fell in step with him, introduced himself as the production manager of a movie company, and asked if the town would be available on certain dates.

When Shelton said that it probably would be available, he was invited to meet the man’s boss. The boss who waited behind the church on the plaza was a huge man named John Wayne. That day, Shelton and Wayne became friends and began an informal partnership in the making of cowboy movies such as McClintock and El Dorado that became classics.

Years into their friendship, Shelton and his wife Jane happened to be standing on a pier in Cabo San Lucas one day when a small boat came to shore from a yacht that stood out in the harbor. A man stepped out of the boat and asked for Bob Shelton. When the latter identified himself, the inquirer said, “Mr. Wayne wants you on his yacht.” Wayne had converted a minesweeper into a pleasure yacht. He loved to play bridge with Jane and somehow had found out that the Sheltons were in Cabo.

“Wayne would rather win $15 from me in a gin game than win a new movie contract,” Shelton said. “He had a high regard and respect for the cowboy and his habits. Cowboys were the guys he most liked to hang around with, because he related to them.”

While Shelton was boss, more than 300 cowboy movies were made in the town, and it became the second largest paid tourist attraction in Arizona, second only to the Grand Canyon. That was only because, as Shelton put it, “The Grand Canyon had a better designer.”

Old Tucson played a prominent role for 60 years in shaping the world’s perception of the Old West and Bob Shelton was in charge for its best 25 years. In 1985, he was forced to sell.

In 1995, under the new management, it burned down and lost its greatest attraction, the old sets on which had walked the great cowboy actors in their great pictures. Rebuilt at three-quarters of its original size, it became a miniature Old Tucson. Movie companies became less interested in it and so did the tourists who had flocked to the sets to see and touch the places where their cowboy film idols had walked. Canada began to draw American filmmakers by giving them tax breaks, as well as scenery that was on a par with Arizona’s, but far less sunshine and no desert.

“I was distressed when the companies turned to Canada because we had enjoyed such wonderful relations with the industry,” Shelton said. “Trends happen. Movie people don’t want to go to Canada, but they hold onto their money better when they do.”

Old Tucson languishes again, even though the movie business has increased fivefold since 1990. The industry spends an estimated $15 billion a year, but it won’t be enticed back to Tucson on promises of scenery and good weather alone.

On its current website, Old Tucson still advertises that it played a prominent role in shaping the world’s perception of the Old West. This is true, but the movie location has not shaped anything of any kind since 1985. Before it burned, its new handlers promoted its Ferris wheel more than it promoted cowboys. Its cowboys were seen only in various arcs and attitudes as they shot each other off the roofs of the buildings. The town is open only on weekends now.

Shelton believes that the cowboy still plays a huge role in American culture. “There’s a little bit of cowboy in all of us,” he said. “Even now, when I ask a producer or director what he would like to do most, he always says he wants to do a Western. Each of them thinks that he will be the one to make the best Western ever. The cowboy is every American’s hero and always will be, because he represents truth, honesty, righteousness—the true culture of our country, the pioneer.”

Nowadays, two different groups of filmmakers are working to buy Old Tucson, each expressing interest in appointing Shelton as an advisor in its restoration. One of the companies is World Film Works of Hollywood. The other group is represented by Jack Thompson, a veteran producer of Western pictures. If either group succeeds and Shelton has anything to say about it, Old Tucson will be a predominantly Western town, but not dedicated solely to Western films. A contemporary studio would be built where any kind of movie can be made, with Eastern city streets and other new sets, in order to draw the makers of films in other genres.

If Old Tucson is restored, there are a lot of American cowboys who would like to see Bob Shelton back in charge, because he is the man with the vision to make a success of it again. Jack Thompson, who has been his friend for 35 years, calls him one of the few true gentlemen of the American West. “We need him at Old Tucson again,” Thompson said. “He is of the old school and every cowboy is indebted to him, John Wayne included.”

A nationally known novelist who has seen his own work translated to the big screen, J.P.S. Brown is a regular contributor to American Cowboy.

There is more inside the March/April 2004  issue of American Cowboy magazine.  
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