More to Mary Than Meets the Eye

I previously wrote about Flicka Night at the Book Club here.

” ‘What is it, do you suppose, that we both find so magical about the Flicka books?’ Richard asked me over his shoulder.

‘I know what you mean,’ I replied.  ‘And I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than the fact that both of us read My Friend Flicka when we were kids–though that may be a part of it too.’

Barbara and I breathed deeply as Richard got out of the car to open and close a gate.  Around us the air was still pungent with sage, and above us the sky was filled with colors and clouds and darkness and light.  At last I could see for myself why Mary always referred to this sky as ‘an inverted bowl,’ for at eight thousand feet above sea level and uncluttered by trees, the horizon was visible for 360 degrees.

‘Maybe it’s because Wyoming is almost a character in itself,’ I went on when Richard returned to the car, ‘a character whose ‘personality’ pervades all three of the novels.  Theme and meaning both seem to grow out of the characters in the Flicka books–they’re organic.’ ”  Sharon Whitehill, writing in On the Trail of Flicka’s Friend, during her research tour of Remount Ranch.

Mary O’Hara wrote My Friend Flicka during a period of extreme emotional and financial hardship following her failed first marriage and a successful screenwriting career in California.  Glad to leave Hollywood Mary and her second husband, a Swede named Helge, moved to a wide expanse named Remount Ranch in Wyoming where the couple hoped to breed and sell polo ponies.

When that venture never quite made them a living she authored non-fiction articles for magazines while the couple added a boys’ summer camp to their work load.  She was researching a challenging topic during this trying period when the business failed and she strongly suspected that Helge was unfaithful (which he was).  She made the decision to put that article aside and write about a subject familiar to her heart:  a struggling yet loving family raising horses on a Wyoming ranch.

My Friend Flicka began as a short story.

As she tells it in her autobiography, Flicka’s Friend, an astute friend of hers advised her to rewrite it as a novel that would translate into a successful screenplay and that is exactly what she did.

The book did indeed become a movie starring a young Roddy McDowell, which became a television series in 1956 (wow, I was born in 1960 and we didn’t even own a tv set yet!).

Mary wrote several more books including Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming, both sequels of Flicka, and the musical Catch Colt which was performed at Catholic University (she wrote the music and lyrics as well) and at the Cheyenne Frontier Days during the ’60s and was later published as a novel.