By Jim Knippenberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Give Cheryl Rogers some credit - she has done something few celebrity offspring have managed: She wrote a book about movie star parents without whining.

The daughter of Roy Rogers and second wife Arline Wilkins, Cheryl grew up calling Dale Evans "mom." Arline died when Cheryl was 6; Roy became Dale's fourth husband a year later in 1947.

By the time we meet Roy in Cowboy Princess, he is already King of the Cowboys. Leonard Slye, his birth name, and his Ohio roots have been left behind in the dust. Although he was born in Cincinnati and reared in Duck Run, Ohio (near Portsmouth), he's a California cowboy when the book opens. Princess is, after all, Cheryl's bio, not Roy's.

Proud of Ohio roots

But in an interview last week, Cheryl addressed Roys' roots: "Dad was so proud of being a Buckeye. He talked about it all the time when we were growing up. Stories about growing up poor and rural, stories about learning to entertain yourself, he loved talking about all that," Cheryl said.

Unofficially, Cheryl was the oldest of the Rogers brood (Dale's son, Tom Fox, was the oldest, but he was off at college when Roy and Dale married), and even at age 7 she considered herself the family's stand-in mother.

Cheryl's relationship with her parents was good and loving, though Cowboy Princess doesn't shy from the rough spots. She's utterly direct about Roy's parenting skills - he was away a lot, either making movies or touring in rodeo shows. When he was home, he was more interested in riding Trigger and going hunting with his pals than doing the Daddy bit.

She's equally direct in discussing Dale's parenting style, particularly Dale's odd insistence that her daughters grow up to be stay-at-home moms, even though she was the very embodiment of the career woman, gone almost as frequently as Roy or, when home, locked in a room writing books.

Cheryl Rogers isn't whining about any of this, just reporting the good along with the bad.

The bad, the really bad, comes with the death of three of the Rogers children: Robin as a toddler from heart disease associated with Down syndrome, Debbie in an auto crash, and Sandy of alcohol poisoning (he was a nondrinker) after some Army buddies dared him to chug a fifth.

Nine children at one time

But there still is plenty of good to be said about the family's composition. At one point, there were nine Rogers children: Four birth children, four adopted children, including Cheryl, and one who grew up in the household as their child but was never adopted because she was a British citizen.

It was a hugely diverse family with a Korean child, a handicapped child, a formerly abused child and a Scottish child. That's also one of the book's flaws - not the number or diversity, but keeping them straight. With Roy's three wives, Dale's four husbands and nine kids from a variety of sources, it's difficult to remember who's who.

Cheryl sticks to a chronological approach here, though she abandons it for the major issues: In detailing the deaths of her three siblings, she drops the chronology and deals with them together, as an emotional issue rather than a historical one. The occasional lapse of chronology is refreshing and goes a long way in keeping the book from becoming yet another of those hideous "and then this happened and then that happened" things we so often get in Hollywood bios.

Oh, that and the lack of whining.

Rogers film fest

If he were alive, Roy Rogers would be celebrating his 92nd birthday Wednesday.

Starz Encore's Westerns Channel celebrates with a four-film salute beginning at 1:15 p.m. Wednesday:

The Carson City Kid, 1:15 p.m.; Romance on the Range, 2:10 p.m.; Cowboy and the Senorita, 3:15 p.m.; North of the Great Divide 4:15 p.m.

Several other Roy Rogers movies will be shown throughout the month at various times.

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E-mail jknippenberg@enquirer.com