Reading through the 1933 issues of LIBERTY, I've been fascinated by this serialized memoir by Tex O'Reilly. He'd already written a memoir years before, but LIBERTY had a slot for violent memoirs (see also the purported Foreign Legion expose "Hell Hounds!") and I doubt Ted would turn down money to let Lowell Thomas, the self-appointed publicist for T. E. Lawrence, rewrite his life story. The veracity of " Hell Hounds!" was widely questioned (and LIBERTY felt it necessary to publish a rebuttal asserting that the Legion actually was very nice), but how credible was O'Reilly?
Did you ever hear of Pecos Bill, the legendary liar of pioneer times? I'd thought he was a folklore figure like Paul Bunyan or John Henry, but the consensus seems to be that one Tex O'Reilly made Pecos Bill up out of whole cloth in the 20th century. A fitting origin, I guess, but on the other hand no one questions that O'Reilly fought in the Philippine Insurrection, the Boxer Uprising, the Mexican Revolution, etc. That core of truth doesn't vouch for every tale he told about those conflicts, of course, and some stories he told Thomas (or let Thomas tell) are pretty much whoppers. But some of those tall tales, whether he invented them himself or not, make this memoir terrifically entertaining and an untapped (to my knowledge) mine of movie material.
I'm thinking of the story he tells, claiming inside knowledge, about the diplomatic mission led by a high-ranking prince sent by China to Germany after the Boxer Uprising to apologize publically and Kaiser Wilhelm for the Boxers' killing of a German diplomat. According to Tex, the Manchu regime wasn't going to let a prince humiliate himself that way and sent a mere barber in his place who got to be a perfect asshole all over Europe in return for getting executed when he came home. Hogwash, history says, but I could see the Chinese or even Hollywood turning this into a speaking-truth-to-power comedy. And what about the story of Death Valley Slim, another American fighting for the Mexican Revolution who got killed alongside a close comrade-in-arms whom everyone took for another old-timer, but turned out to be a woman? Maybe the biggest whopper Ted tells in the whole serial is his assertion that, while he knew of woman soldiers, he'd never heard of one wearing men's clothes before this.
Then there's his account, admittedly second-hand, of the Rasputin-like demise of Ambrose Bierce. The old gringo met Tex hoping to get access to Pancho Villa and made another appointment with O'Reilly but never showed up. The way Ted heard it later, Bierce went on a bender, got badly mixed up, and ended up with General Huerta's army asking for directions, in minimal drunken Spanish, to Villa's camp. Unsurprisingly, Huerta's men decided to execute the guy. They walked him to a cemetery, sat him down and shot him. Bierce only laughed, Tex says. They shot him several times more, supposedly, with Bierce laughing all the way, perhaps too sozzled to feel pain, until they put one through his heart. For 1933 publication, O'Reilly claimed that he could lead anyone still wondering what happened to Bierce's grave, but I guess no one took him up on it.
I have a 1950s men's-adventure mag with a cover feature on O'Reilly, who had died in 1946. I'd guess his story actually was told several times over in that era, and that seems fitting in light of his apparent inclination to stretch the truth, and the definite inclination of LIBERTY and other magazines published by Bernarr Macfadden (including one called TRUE STORY) to do so. Macfadden is an ancestor of the men's-adventure genre, particularly as the publisher of the genre-defining crime mag, TRUE DETECTIVE, and I'll take a glance at his company's efforts in the "for men" line in an early post.