In the series Last Resorts, The Show is looking at the history and future of resorts, and the Valley as a resort community. Visit some of the Valley’s oldest and newest resorts. Hear how they’ve impacted the region — from art and architecture, to how people all over the world view the West.
It's time to visit the Hermosa Inn in Paradise. Specifically, a room that looks like a library, filled with the paintings of Lon Megargee. If his first name sounds familiar — he’s the Lon for whom the resort’s restaurant is named.
Megargee’s paintings depicted the West — or maybe, they depicted an idealized version of the West that would appeal to people in the Midwest or on the East Coast and encourage them to travel to Arizona. Either way, his work helped build the Hermosa Inn — and the region.
Betsy Fahlman is a professor of art history at Arizona State University and adjunct curator of American Art at the Phoenix Art Museum and author of the book "The Cowboy’s Dream: The Mythic Life and Art of Lon Megargee." Fahlman joined The Show to talk about Lon Megargee's work and his legacy, and why she considers Megargee to be Arizona’s original cowboy artist.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: ... Sitting surrounded by his paintings. I asked Fahlman who exactly Lon was.
BETSY FAHLMAN: Lon was an interesting guy. He had multiple identities. He never told the truth if he could help it. He grew up in Philadelphia but came out here to live finally, and he could change his name. I mean, this is a western thing. You can go to a new place, and you can get another name. So he added a few letters to his, to his name. But he never was related to anyone with that name. And so he came out, and he claimed to be a rancher. He didn't own the ranch. He did paintings. He did commercial work, at a time when it was very lucrative to do commercial work. But he could make money, but he had a very ... hard time holding on to it.
BRODIE: So, let's talk about what drew him out here. I mean, we hear a lot, especially at the time that he was coming out here, and you alluded to this — you come west, you can, it's sort of a fresh start. Was that what drew him out here?
FAHLMAN: I think partly. He sometimes did it in the wrong way. He'd come out here in the summers and then go back to Philadelphia to do art school.
BRODIE: (Laughs) Yeah, that's not good.
FAHLMAN: And then finally came out here, you know, full, full time. But he also worked at the Paramount, designing sets. And he always had a line, you know, "OK, I could do this in blue or if you want, I'd like you to buy this" ... all those kind of things. He, he was, he was always on the make, I think. But, he did some important commissions. He did the, A1 beer commissions, which are really quite interesting. There are four of them, but the best one is "The Cowboy's Dream."
And when I worked on this, I got a whole line of people who said, "Oh, I know the model." And of course it was Lon, it wasn't them. And that ... they had been part of that, and they weren't.
BRODIE: What was so alluring about the cowboy lifestyle to him?
FAHLMAN: I think he found it fascinating.. That it was a whole different way of living that he didn't have in, in Philadelphia. And if you look at the covers for the magazines up there, some of them are Lon posing. But they're ... he tried to capture that essence of the American West in his own, in his own way. I spent a lot of time — the adventure magazine up there, was someone claimed it was a famous movie star in Hollywood, but it wasn't. And it's actually Lon who was ... modeling there. And he was the model actually for the first A1 picture. So, but it was just a, a way of living in a place that you could invent yourself again. It was cheap to live out here. You could kind of get out of the way if you needed to. But he was, he had a very flexible view of life.
BRODIE: Well, it seems like maybe, you know, you hear so much about people drawn to like the rugged lifestyle or the gritty kind of lifestyle that you can have in the West as a cowboy. It seems like that was maybe less important to Lon than the fact that he could be maybe somewhat anonymous. And could as you, as you've alluded to, you know, not change his identity per se, but sort of become somebody else.
FAHLMAN: I mean, because he never did own, own the ranch. He did some cowboying, but he was, he was a short guy. If you ever see a picture of him, he's not a, not a tall guy at all. So that wasn't the western, you know, view that Lon had. But I think he found it convenient to live out here. He could do what he wanted, on for a while. He did get good commissions, and he was a very busy painter.
BRODIE: How would you say that his paintings evolved over time? Obviously, he started when he was on the East Coast and then came out here. So I would think that it's not just something you can snap your fingers and become a cowboy artist or western artist.
FAHLMAN: No. He, he did art study. You know, he, he liked to claim he was born in Yombstone. That wasn't true there. And he did go to art school. I have his — I have the records of that. So he wasn't just sort of doing it on, on his own. So, by the end of his career, he's working in a very expressionist way. That's a rather different style from, from his early early years. And that is his late style. He did some scarves. He, you know, he tried a little bit of everything, and he always always had an angle — "Oh, you like that? I'll, you know, do so do do these for free or not for free. But you can, you can buy them from me."
But he wasn't a very good salesman in some ways. But [Arizona] Gov. Hunt, I think, supported him a lot. And the one of the tales is he met, Gov. Hunt by Hunt was hitchhiking someplace. And he got picked up by Lon, and they talked, and that's how they met. I mean, and that would seem a very improbable thing today. But I guess that worked in, in that time. But Hunt was a good supporter of him.
BRODIE: So let's talk about the place that we're in. We're at Lon's at the Hermosa Inn. And this started off in some way as a place that he built or, or had built for himself.
FAHLMAN: Yeah. He, because ... he was cheap, I'm sure he worked with someone. Because I don't think he probably had the skill set to do the whole thing, but he didn't keep it very long. I, you know, and it may have been an inn, I'm not quite sure. But I know he did live there, and so we sold it when, during a divorce, because he needed the money for that. ... I have pictures of it. But it's, it's an interesting commission, but he couldn't keep it very long.
BRODIE: So, when you look at this facility, now, how much does it sort of look like if he had the resources, maybe, to do it —
FAHLMAN: I think when he had the resources, he, it would have looked very much like it, it does now. There earlier pieces that you can see in the front, the front gate? But the people who have restored this over the years have kept very much to the aesthetic of Lon Megargee.
BRODIE: It seems like there's a very interesting dynamic at play here that what drew Lon to the West and to Arizona in many ways is what the travel and tourism industry used in some ways in that same time to draw other people out here. Sort of the mystique of the West, the aura of the West, maybe the mystery of the West.
FAHLMAN: Right, right. No, that definitely, that definitely was it. Because he stayed, and he had multiple houses. He had a house out in Cave Creek. He had a house in Sedona. His last house was in Sedona. And he had a few other little spots, there. So, you know, he was really into what, what went on for a western, a western person.
BRODIE: So when you walk around here, and you look at his paintings and his prints on the wall and the building — both the original and what has been built in addition — and you think about his career and, you know, sort of what brought him here and how his life went here. What comes to mind for you?
FAHLMAN: Well, the fact that he stayed, and he really identified himself as an Arizona artist, even though he would travel to, you know, the West Coast from time to time. And, you know, go to Mexico because there's a couple of paintings of, of Mexico. But I think it just suited him. I don't think — he was kind of a loner. So I don't think he wanted to be in a place like the Taos ... society. And that was too, too big, too many, too many people, too many, too much competition. And so I think it suited him to be, to be out here. He could do very different things.
BRODIE: Let me ask you about Lon's work for Stetson, because that was also seemingly a pretty big part of it.
FAHLMAN: That was a very good, good commission. He did about four or five, maybe up to seven different versions of what Stetson had. It was "The Last Drop" from his Stetson that made the name there, and it wasn't invented by him. There are other earlier artists who had the last drop, ... what they did was the cowboy bent down and gave his horse a drink before he had a drink because you couldn't go anywhere without your horse. You could live without a wife, but not without the horse. So that one was sort of the iconic one, but he did a whole series of them. Every so often you see, come up.
What do you think Lon's legacy is in terms of not the development of the West and of Arizona, but of maybe teaching people about it or showing people who had never been here or weren't from here hat Arizona looked like? And maybe, to an extent, encouraging them to come visit or come move?
FAHLMAN: Good question. I don't know that he was that commercial in that way. But certainly the imagery that he did, you know whether it was a magazine cover or whether it was a painting or whether it was a print — he did a lot of prints and portfolios because they, they could be sold more, more cheaply. And I think if it sold, he was really happy to do it, really. But I think, you know, he really imbued the spirit of what the West, what the West was.
