He stands alert and pricks
up his ears when John Wayne’s album, America — Why I Love Her, is played.
He is fed imported alfalfa and his living quarters are about three times as large as the quarters for others of his kind. When he visits big cities across the country, women cry and children beg to touch him. He’s even allowed to ride in elevators.
This 1,600-pound horse is no ordinary horse, of course.
He is Dollor, John Wayne’s 17-year-old movie horse, semiretired and living on a 7-acre ranch in Midlothian — south of Dallas — with Howard and Debra Keffeler, their son, David, and nine other horses, four dogs, three cats and several chickens.
“Dollor is a movie legend just as much as John Wayne was,” says Debra Keffeler, 31. “A cowboy is not a cowboy without his horse. They’re both my heroes.”
Dollor is a veteran of such movies as Big Jake, The Cowboys, Rooster Cogburn, Chisholm, Train Robbers and Wayne’s last film, The Shootist.
In The Shootist, Wayne changed the script so he could mention Dollor’s name several times, Debra Keffeler says. In the movie, Wayne tells young actor Ron Howard to take Dollor and “get him a double helpin’ of oats.” In the end, Wayne dies just after he gives Dollor to the young boy.
In Dollor’s movie days, the chestnut quarter horse belonged to Dick Webb Movie Productions. Wayne was so fond of him that he named him Dollor and drew up exclusive movie rights that allowed no one else to ride him, and the horse was not to be sold until Wayne’s death, Keffeler says.
Webb kept the horse for a year after Wayne’s death five years ago. Dollor then was ridden in two television productions — by Robert Wagner in Hart to Hart and by John Forsythe in Dynasty.
Webb sold Dollor to the International Rodeo Association, which sold him a few months later to Terry Busch, of Iowa. In the year Busch owned him, Dollor traveled 134,000 miles across the northern United States to appear in shows, Keffeler says.
Keffeler, manager of Double D-D Western Wear in Duncanville, also south of Dallas, says she first saw Dollor a little more than a year ago during a western wear show at the Dallas Apparel Mart and “it was love at first sight.” Busch planned either to sell half his investment in the horse or to sell him to a prospective buyer in Europe, she says.
“I thought Dollor should live in Texas in the open air like an animal and not be traipsed across the world like a freak in a side show,” she says.
So she got financial backing from two investors in North Dallas. They are David Pellham and Phil Yarnell — both are avid Wayne fans.
Keffeler refuses to reveal how much Dollor cost except to say that “it was a bunch.” She says the three owners have papers proving the horse is Wayne’s movie horse and a black birthmark on Dollor’s left hind quarter is clearly visible in the movie Train Robbers.
“Dollor is very well trained and well mannered and we bought him mainly because we wanted to take care of him,” Pellham says.
But Pellham and Keffeler say they also want to keep John Wayne’s memory alive by keeping Dollor in the limelight.
They have had him in parades and have used him to promote Double D-D Western Wear and other businesses for a fee.
As a tribute to Wayne, she says, they saddle Dollor up for appearances but don’t let anyone ride him.
“We don’t intend to get rich off Dollor,” she says. “We just have a lot of respect for the patriotism and righteousness John Wayne stands for. We think we can remind other people of those strong traits through the horse he loved so dearly.”
