Tim McCoy

Tim McCoy
McCoy in 1934
Born	(1891-04-10)April 10, 1891 Saginaw, Michigan, U.S.
Died	January 29, 1978(1978-01-29) (aged 86) Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, U.S.
Occupations	Actor showman television host
Years active	1925–1965
Spouses	Agnes Heron Miller ​ ​ (m. 1917; div. 1931)​ Inga Arvad ​ ​ (m. 1946; died 1973)​
Children	5

Colonel Timothy John Fitzgerald McCoy (April 10, 1891 – January 29, 1978) was an American actor, military officer, and expert on American Indian life. McCoy is most noted for his roles in B-grade Western films. As a popular cowboy film star, he had his picture on the front of a Wheaties cereal box.

Early years

Tim McCoy was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on April 10, 1891. His father was an Irish Union Civil War veteran and Police Chief.^[1] While attending St. Ignatius College (now Loyola University), McCoy saw a Wild West show that influenced him to purchase a one-way ticket west. He ended up in Lander, Wyoming, where he worked as a ranch hand. While there, he became an expert horseman and roper while developing an extensive knowledge of the customs and languages of the local American Indian tribes.^[1] McCoy was a renowned expert in Indian sign language and was named "High Eagle" by the Arapaho tribe of the Wind River reservation. He also competed in numerous rodeos.^[2]

Military career

McCoy enlisted as a soldier in the U.S. Army and served in the cavalry during World War I (although he did not serve in combat nor overseas).^[1][3] He served again in World War II in Europe, rising to the rank of colonel with the Army Air Corps and Army Air Forces. He also served as adjutant general of Wyoming between the wars with the brevet rank of brigadier general. At 28, he was one of the youngest brigadier generals in the history of the U.S. Army.^[4]

Acting career

Early career

In 1922, David Townsend, president of the Mountain Plains Enterprise Film Company, planned to build "Sunshine Studios" at McCoy's Owl Creek Dude ranch in order to shoot a film titled, "The Dude Wrangler," written by Caroline Lockhart but the project was abandoned.^[5]

That same year, he was asked by the head of Famous Players–Lasky, Jesse L. Lasky, to provide American Indian extras for the Western extravaganza, The Covered Wagon (1923). He brought hundreds of Indians to the Utah location and served as a technical advisor on the film. After filming was completed, McCoy was asked to bring a much smaller group of Indians to Hollywood, for a stage presentation preceding each showing of the film.

McCoy's stage show was popular, running eight months in Hollywood and several more months in London and Paris. McCoy returned to his Wyoming ranch, but Irving Thalberg of MGM soon signed him to a contract to star in a series of outdoor adventures and McCoy rose to stardom. His first MGM feature was War Paint (1926), featuring epic scenes of the Wind River Indians on horseback, staged by McCoy and director Woody Van Dyke. (Footage from War Paint was reused in many low-budget Westerns, well into the 1950s.)

War Paint set the tone for future McCoy Westerns, in that Indians were always portrayed sympathetically, and never as bloodthirsty savages. One notable McCoy feature for MGM was The Law of the Range (1928), in which he starred with Joan Crawford.

The coming of talking pictures, and the temporary difficulty in recording sound outdoors, resulted in MGM terminating its Tim McCoy series and McCoy returning once more to his ranch. In 1929 he was summoned back to Hollywood personally by Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, who insisted that McCoy star in the first talking Western serial, The Indians Are Coming. The action was filmed on an epic scale, and footage from The Indians Are Coming was reused for years in Universal westerns and serials. The Indians Are Coming was very successful, leading to another Tim McCoy serial for Universal, Heroes of the Flames (1931).

Columbia Pictures

Harry Cohn ran Columbia, then a small, struggling studio trying to improve its standing in the industry. Cohn often hired stars who had just been dismissed by larger companies, giving Columbia features the name value of important players. Tim McCoy joined Columbia in 1931, and remained with the studio for four years, making over 30 new films^[6]. One of his best-known Columbia credits is Two Fisted Law (1932) with John Wayne and Walter Brennan.

In 1935, Cohn decided he wanted a younger cowboy hero (Charles Starrett got the job), and McCoy was released. That same year he signed with independent producer Sam Katzman, whose films had lower budgets and shorter schedules than Columbia's. McCoy had no qualms about working under these lesser conditions, but he did insist on his standard salary of $4,000 weekly (about $96,500 in 2026). Katzman agreed, and McCoy made a string of outdoor adventures.

Then McCoy was temporarily absent from the Hollywood scene. The Ringling Brothers Circus offered him a chance to tour with their show, and then McCoy formed his own "wild west" show. The latter venture was not a success; it was reported to have lost $300,000 (about $6,880,000 in 2026), one third of which was McCoy's own money. It folded in Washington, D.C., and the cowboy performers were each given $5 and McCoy's thanks. The Indians on the show were returned to their respective reservations by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

McCoy was available for pictures again in 1938, and low-budget producers (including Sam Katzman and Maurice Conn) engaged him at his standard salary of $4,000 weekly, for eight films a year. In 1941 Buck Jones recruited McCoy to co-star in "The Rough Riders" series, alongside Jones and Raymond Hatton. The eight films, released by Monogram Pictures, were very popular, and might have continued but McCoy declined to renew his contract, opting to pursue other interests. Monogram made one more picture with Jones and Hatton, and then Jones died in the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942.

Personal life

McCoy’s first wife was the actress Agnes Heron Miller, the daughter of Henry Miller and Bijou Heron. They had two sons and a daughter and were divorced on July 20, 1931.^[11] Henry Miller was the director and producer of La Tendresse, in which Ronald Colman made his last stage appearance. Colman was to become McCoys closest friend in Hollywood and godfather to one of his sons, who was named after him. McCoy was best man at Colman’s wedding to Benita Hume and became godfather to his daughter Juliet.^[12] McCoy’s second wife was Inga Arvad whom he married in 1947.^[13] They had two sons, Ronnie and Terry. McCoy was married to Arvad until her death from cancer in 1973. Arvad was a journalist from Denmark, investigated by the FBI in the early 1940s due to rumors that she was a Nazi spy. There were photographs of Arvad as a guest of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, and she had twice interviewed him. This investigation included the wiretapping of Arvad during a brief affair with John F. Kennedy in late 1941 and 1942, when Kennedy was serving in the U.S. Navy. No evidence of spying against Arvad was ever found.^[14][15]

Later years

In 1976, he was interviewed at length by author James Horwitz for the cowboy memoir They Went Thataway. McCoy's final, posthumous, appearance was in Hollywood (1980), Kevin Brownlow-David Gill's television history of silent films.

McCoy died due to heart disease on January 29, 1978, at the Raymond W. Bliss Army Medical Center of Ft. Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona.^[16] He was cremated and his ashes returned to his Nogales home. Nine years later his remains, and those of his wife, Inga, who had died in 1973, were returned to his birthplace at Saginaw, Michigan, for burial in the Mount Olivet Cemetery next to his family's plot.^[17]

Filmography

Poster for The Fighting Fool (1932)

Lobby card for Daring Danger (1932)

Poster for Texas Cyclone (1932)

Poster for Bulldog Courage (1935)

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Tim McCoy Remembers the West: An Autobiography by Tim McCoy and Ronald McCoy (1977)

Hardback:

ISBN 0-385-12798-7

ISBN 978-0-385-12798-1

Paperback:

ISBN 978-0-8032-8155-4

• Tim McCoy on the Tomahawk Trail by Gaylord Du Bois. Big Little Book, Whitman, 1937. Western novel about Tim McCoy (full text).
• Tim McCoy—A Wyoming Poet. RoundTop Records, LLC., Thermopolis, Wyoming

Paperback:

ISBN 978-0-9796970-0-5

DVD

• Col. Tim McCoy's The Silent Language of the Plains! RoundTop Records, LLC. Thermopolis, Wyoming

ISBN 978-0-9796970-1-2

External links

• Works by or about Tim McCoy at the Internet Archive
• Tim McCoy Papers at the American Heritage Center
• Tim McCoy, Western Star at AHC blogs
• Tim McCoy at IMDb
• The Tim McCoy Show at IMDb
• Tim McCoy at Virtual History