It's hard to tell whether Ben Johnson is more proud of his World Rodeo Championship title or his Academy Award for "The Last Picture Show."
The veteran actor and Phoenix-area resident, a real cowboy who was born and reared in Oklahoma, never took to the Hollywood lifestyle, despite making more than 300 films."I'm not a big fan of actors," he said. "I don't hobnob with them."
Johnson, who would not give his age but is in his 70s, has worked with all the big names. He has appeared in films with John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, Alan Ladd and William Holden, to name just a few.
"I taught most of them how to ride a horse," he said. "The problem with some actors is they were onstage 24 hours a day. They never could be real. They didn't know how to get away and relax. I don't like that way of living."
That way of living was not how he was reared, either. Johnson grew up on his father's ranch near Pawhuska, Okla., and was working as a cowboy in 1939 when Howard Hughes, who had bought some horses for "The Outlaw," hired Johnson as a wrangler.
"That's how I got to Hollywood, in a carload of horses," Johnson said.
Because Hughes paid him $175 a week, compared with the $40 a month he was making as a cowboy, "it didn't take me long to recognize this was a good deal," Johnson said.
Not long after he arrived in Hollywood, Johnson met and married Carol Jones.
"My wife passed away a few months ago," Johnson said. "We were married 54 years. She was a great partner, a good person."
After spending his first few years in the movies as an extra, stuntman and double, Johnson said, it was in either 1943 or 1944 that he got his first speaking part.
"The first line I ever had in the movies, we was doing one of the `Red Riders,' " Johnson said of the series of short Westerns. "The line was, `I have a telegram for you from the United States Treasury Department.' "
The scene called for Johnson to ride up on his horse, dismount, run inside and deliver the line while giving the telegram to another actor.
"So I studied this line for about eight days and eight nights so I'd be sure to know it," he said. "Then I get out there and run the horse like heck and step off and I forget my line. I messed up the shot about three times before I could remember my line."
Johnson quit Hughes and went to work for director John Ford. He also began to work steadily as an actor, getting mostly small parts.
Then he walked away from the silver screen.
"I took time off, one year out of the picture business, to go into rodeo and see what I could do," Johnson said. "My dad was a World's Champion three or four times, so I wanted to be. Fortunately, I won the World's Championship in team roping (1953), but at the end of the year I didn't have $3. All I had was a wore-out automobile and a mad wife."
So Johnson returned to films but remained a relative unknown until 1969, when he appeared in a supporting role in the Sam Peckinpah film "The Wild Bunch," starring William Holden.
" `The Wild Bunch' has been re-released in the director's cut," Johnson said. "This version is the version Peckinpah wanted the first time, but they wouldn't let him. It was too ragged, too violent."
The film, opening March 31 in selected cities, holds up well today and is one of Johnson's favorites.
"There was more gunpowder exploded in "The Wild Bunch" than any picture in the history of the business," Johnson said.
Peckinpah's reputation as a wild man drawn to violence was not a creation of publicists.
"I saved Peckinpah's life a thousand times, I guess," Johnson said. "He'd get drunk and pick a fight with somebody, and I'd pick up the pieces. He was pretty bad about that, but he was also a genius. He had the ability to put something up on that screen. If you like hostility, he was a master at it."
The first time Johnson met Peckinpah was when the director asked him to appear in "Major Dundee," starring Charlton Heston.
"I went to his office to meet him, and I was sitting across the desk from Sam when a stuntman comes in. Well, Sam abused him something terrible, yelling at him. He did it there, in front of me, and when the man walked out I just said, `I can't work for you.'
"Sam says, `Well, why not?'
"I says, ` . . . if you did to me what you did to that man there, I'd hit you right in the nose and you'd run me out of the business, and I'm not ready to leave.'
"He says, `Well, I'm not that bad. I was just trying to scare him a little.' "
Johnson signed on for the film.
After "The Wild Bunch" hit the theaters, Johnson was sent a script for a film called "The Last Picture Show." He sent it back and said he wasn't interested.
"It was the worst thing I ever read," Johnson said. "Every other word that I had (in the script) was a dirty word, so I turned it down."
Johnson isn't a prude; he just didn't see any value in using that much foul language. So the issue was dead, as far as he was concerned. Then he got a call from director John Ford, who asked him to do the film as a personal favor. Johnson relented, on the condition that director Peter Bogdanovich allow Johnson to rewrite his dialogue.
"I rewrote my part, and I won the English Academy Award, the American Academy Award (Best Supporting Actor), a Golden Globe Award and the New York Film Critics award, and I didn't have to say one dirty word," he said.
Despite the 1971 Oscar, Johnson never became a major star, a leading man. He said he is content to play supporting roles and, unlike many actors, he has no desire to direct films.
"I couldn't be a director because I couldn't put up with them actors today," Johnson said. "They can't get there on time, and they got to go bump their head on a wall to do a scene. They'd lose my business right there. To me, that's not real.
"I don't care if I get any big roles. I'll do little cameo parts."
And those parts keep Johnson working. He recently appeared in a "Bonanza" television movie.
"It was the worst thing I've ever seen; I doubt they'll do another one," Johnson said of the movie. "There's eight or nine of us, all of us shooting, and we never did hit nobody. It was bad. It was just plumb bad."
But he continues working and just finished a film with Tom Selleck, "Ruby Jane and Joe," that "I think going to be good."
When he's not working in the "picture business," Johnson keeps busy by staging Pro-Celebrity Team Roping rodeos for children's charities.
"I've been doing this for about 10, 11 years, and I've given several million dollars to charities for kids," he said. "I don't know if it means anything to anybody else, but it gives me pleasure."
In the past two years, Johnson's roping events in Arizona have raised more than $67,000. The money was donated to Arizonans for a Drug Free Youth, Salvation Army Youth Center and Child Crisis Shelters.
"Long as I can get on my horse, I'll be there," he said.