“The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his
person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and
legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served
for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was
small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long
snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck
to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a
hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one
might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or
some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.” — American fiction writer, biographer
and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider (1975)
The image accompanying this post shows Will Rogers
as Ichabod Crane and Lois Meredith as Katrina Van Tassel, in the 1922 silent
film The Headless Horseman.
At five feet 11 inches, Rogers was not the beanpole
imagined by Irving. But the lovable humorist was already well launched on a
career that would make him one of Hollywood’s most highly paid stars before
dying in a plane crash in 1935, so that made him a box-office draw.
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